June 9th, 2021

Everything smells like humidity and anticipation and neither is doing me any good lately. 

I told myself firmly tonight that I have to leave shit where it lies. Like the 6, yes 6, dead deer I saw on the roads I drove the past in the last 48 hours. I used to stare at road kill. Before it hurt so much to see it all. 

I was about to back my car out of the driveway the other morning and a dead baby bird lay on the windshield. A sacrifice as no nest could have even been close. I thought about scooping it up and burying it in my garden, but I was sick with hurt and loneliness and I ignored it. 

I smell the deer. Seeing the road kill that’s so close from the moment of ... Oh it’s a possum, to ‘oh it’s a cat.” It’s almost always too much for me.  All I think about is childhood films like robin hood where the characters were animals. I think about the animals I saved as a child. The cats I’ve saved as an adult. 

I feel odd in my skin. 31, isolated for so long. Not sure what intimacy feels like. Does it feel like what I was taught to pick up, or care for… the dead animal,  bury in in the ground you have, that land that is and isn’t yours. Return or help the animal that needs it. No holds bar… That’s respect. Intimacy is respect but warmer. 

Even those I love, I don’t know how to love… their way. Oh lord, do I know how to love my way. My love is a she, and she is messy, and warm. She is present and delightful. She will find a way, because it must. She is troublesome, and trickery laced in sweetness. She is challenging, and anticipatory. Intimidating because it has a foundation, first floor and more. She is fine textiles and carefully picked out furniture. A furnished, well cared for house.  My love is racked with that space of want and anticipation. 

Rarely do I ever feel that my live aligns with others. So she and I wait, aggressive, on edge, ready. A predatory where the methods are extinct. 

I love myself, and it’s complicated. I respect myself and it’s complicated. I am my own companion and it’s complicated. She and I both are combative, greedy, and can’t shut her god damn fucking mouth. Not out of spite, not out or hurt, not out of manipulation. Never… because there’s a moment where things are clear, life gives us divine timing when there is distraction and it doesn’t.. and then where they aren’t and the latter seems more common.