She always looks at me like this. A look of love and a tiny bit of condescention. "Oh you," she seems to say, "you keeper of my life and heart. How can you have so much power yet be so naiive."
She watches me waste away my days, in front of glowing whirring boring things, while she perfects her downward dog (just kidding, it comes naturally) and sleeps in the planter. She woke me up this morning to play. To play! What a good cat. But I simply grunted and shut the door.
Other than the cat, I've been thinking daily, hourly, of going home. Home to late nights, mountain lion fear, restraunt work, strong hearts, wild gestures, and wise trees. The drunken (in vino veritas) words of a woman who was in Becky's math class keep coming back to me. "You have to go back, eventually." And it is so true, and I have accepted it fully into my visions of my future, but it's dominating the view. What is next, what is first, what is now?
I am begging the world for action and purpose, but I am both sitting passively and longing for the escape of home. Can I bring it there? Five thousand four hundred seventy five left to go. I am measuring time in dollars. Every time I explain how things are, the Listener has the opposite reaction as I am having. I'm a success, apparently, for doing almost nothing every day and filling up that fivethousandfourhundrenseventyfivedollar hole.
soon, Soon, SOON it will be the next thing. But that is how I've always felt. How much waiting can I do before I trick myself into waiting for death?
Ah, well, at least from Vashti I feel that I am getting the appropriate response. "You are stupid and this is dumb, but I understand and love you anyway."
