I'm inhabiting this out-of-step feeling, or being inhabited by it, carrying it around in the ends of my fingers and inside my ribs. I'm convinced that I've done something wrong and I don't know what it is, but I know that it's unfixable.
I've been avoiding dealing with my health, not making appointments, not eating well. I got a crappy tattoo. I'm always about to cry, and prone to canceling plans. (And now that I tried to make/keep plans, the world has decided to try to end in snow) . I'm irritable and sedentary. I'm feeling soured, like milk, more upset by not seeing Bespoke, Chile and her beau, Hands and Hips, and maybe even Coolidge.
I'm seized by these tricks of perspective, where I can almost see the metaphor, feeling like Rob Brezny would use this moment as an illustrative story. That long-ago pickup truck, with the hand-stenciled "Things fall off". Buying my first cup of coffee three months after I'd quit coffee and cigarettes, only to wreck my car on the mass pike before it was even cool enough to drink, spilling the coffee on the ceiling, and then sitting in a snowstorm in the cab of the pickup truck waiting for the police with a chainsmoking man.
Today I dropped our toaster and shattered it on the kitchen floor. It was never a very good toaster, but it matched the other appliances and it sort of made toast. I laid my knuckle open trying to fix it, one of those cuts so swift and deep that it didn't even really hurt, and the edges gaped open, bloodless for a second. And then the bleeding started and took forever to stop. I didn't even like the fucking toaster.
Maybe the thing that's off is Funnyface's absence, an uncorrectable flaw in the world. I couldn't save her and I'll never be able to.
And maybe that's it, maybe Funnyface being gone makes my home not home, because she was part of the definition of home, of safety and no amount of mindless jigsaw puzzles will patch this whole. I can't outwait her loss, even if I know the grief will start fading. If home is where Funnyface is, than there's no home anymore.
