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[nihkol]

While watching Carol & the End of the World, a Netflix adult animation series released in December 2023, I noticed an important detail (see above). The Distraction was a mundane office where several dozen people clocked into work despite the looming end of the world. Convenient distraction, right? Perhaps we're reaching the end of OUR world and the Distractions are endless. Streaming series, social media, the plethora of the Internet, news outlets, musical artists, etc. All keeping us in a state of compliance and general unease. But we've gotten used to it. Until you know.

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[nihkol]

will I ever reach the edge of the Internet??

[nihkol]

maybe self-care is spending an extra 30 seconds brushing your teeth

because you deserve to be clean

and deep down, you know it.

[nihkol]

Reflections on Life, 04/27/2024

His car slowed down, little by little, until it was just us in the middle of the road. I looked back to see if there were any cars coming. A car had stopped ahead too. He was in anguish, I could tell. What about? I looked around frantically for the cat I knew had been smashed on that road. I couldn’t see. My glasses were in my backpack. Everything was red. I may not have seen the cat, but I saw through its eyes for just a moment. A brief moment in time.

Isn’t that all we have?

Next thing I know, we’re going over the sidewalk and into a small grassy field next to an elementary school. The other car is still parked on the side of a main road, the road we were driving down. I’m confused as all hell. I look up and see him disappear. The driver’s car door is left ajar. Where has he gone? I scramble to find my glasses. He’s left the car in the middle of the sidewalk with the windshield wipers going and I don’t know what to do now. My glasses are now on my face. I’m walking up the road, just a little bit, and then I hear-

Ahhhh!

He’s got his hands to his mouth, a foot away from a cat on the pavement. Not moving. I hold my breath, watching. For just one miraculous moment, there are no cars coming down that main road. It’s just him and that cat, sharing a breath. Images of cars smashing them both run through my head and I bring myself back to the present moment. He’s looking at the cat. He’s looking, thinking. My heart is beating rapid in my chest.

I will never forget this moment. He bends down, a shadow against a shadow, life against death. He lifts the cat into his arms and starts walking towards the sidewalk. Cars are starting to come over the hill. I’m holding my breath again. I’ve never seen such a magnificent act of humanity.

Then he runs. 

He runs like crazy through a nearby shopping center and I look back at the car, speckled with rain, in the middle of the sidewalk with the windshield wipers going and I don’t know what to do now. I must watch his car. Five agonizing minutes pass. My heart is steady now, but anxious. My breath is hitched. Where is he?

He comes back with a bundle in his hands, something that looks like blankets. Blankets? The cat is still with him? He rushes towards me and passes the semi-lifeless body to my arms. “Take him!” he shouts. “Hospital! Pet hospital!”

I am flabbergasted. Is he still moving? The cat. I can see its head twisted out of the blankets, barely moving.

The ride to the hospital is a frantic one. I half-expect we will get hit on the way there. We drive up to the hospital and I’m feeling the warm, heavy weight of the cat in my arms. All of this feels surreal, like I’m in a dream. I know I’m not.

He rushes out of the driver’s seat to take the cat and I look down at him for one moment – I see his mouth open, eyes squeezed shut. I don’t need to speak cat language to know that he’s in pain. A lot of pain. He’s out of my arms and it’s the same situation again, I’m watching him hold this cat in a bundle and knock on the hospital’s door frantically.

It’s when he gets into the emergency room that I notice a little smear of blood on my thumb. Where did that blood come from? The cat.

I hadn’t seen the cat’s injury, but from its shallow breathing, I could tell it was close to death. I looked at that smear of blood and everything started hitting me full force. The weight of this situation. I looked between the car and the hospital entrance, car and the hospital entrance. Wondering what was going to happen. And feeling afraid that I couldn’t guarantee a goddamn thing.

He beckons me into the hospital. The cat’s gone. It’s a sterile environment, washed out and unmemorable. Save for this one moment. We go into the bathroom. It’s a copy of every other hospital bathroom I’ve ever seen.

We’re taking turns washing blood off of our hands.

He’s shell-shocked, I can tell. He hasn’t said a word since the car. He’s staring into space. Where is the cat? What if this cat dies? Who is going to take care of the cat? I’m crying and he’s holding me in this little, sterile bathroom in a 24/7 pet hospital. We never thought we’d come here.

As he’s filling out paperwork, I sit in a small room with an operating table and a box of tissues. It only hits me later that those tissues are for people’s tears. I’m sure a lot of bad news gets told here.

The doctor comes in and shares the bad news. The cat has been hit really severely, major trauma to the internal organs and blood leaking out of the nose and mouth. He wasn’t breathing. His heart wasn’t going. CPR for 15 minutes? Yes, he nodded. Still not speaking.

I gripped his hand tightly and started praying. Chantress Seba’s music started flowing back into my consciousness after an hours-long break. I had it on repeat for the entire day and it was coming back in one long, haunting breath in my chest. The more I listened to her notes, the more afraid I felt.

The image was blurry, but I kept seeing the cat come back to life on that cold, dry metal table in the other room. I saw the cat let out a puff of air in my mind. Then he’s alive, but he would have to face immeasurable pain from the injury he sustained. I didn’t want to think about that. Just the image of him surviving, like a blurry reflection in water.

The doctor came back and told us another round of bad news. He wasn’t coming back. We had the chance to say our goodbyes.

When they brought the cat back in, cleaned up and in a towel, we took a peek. The first thing I noticed was his eyes. How black they were. The light was completely snuffed out of them. A little bit of blood ringed his nostril. His whiskers were coarse, fur soft. Only his head was exposed.

I couldn’t bring myself to touch the cat, not yet.

He started speaking under his breath in Japanese. I stood behind him and looked into the cat’s lifeless eyes. He stood up to put a hand on the cat’s side and I saw a profound shift in his face. His eyes became glossy and he froze up like someone had shot him. I read his mind and saw his beloved cat flashing through his mind.

When I did work up the nerve to touch the cat (on top of the blanket), I felt the muscles and the soft fur not unlike that of his beloved cat. The only thought running through my mind was “He’s just a bag of organs and bones at this point.” Not in a derogatory way. I just knew that the true essence of that cat was no longer with us. Instead of mourning his shell, we should be looking to the sky and thanking him for his existence. 

I silently wished him well, the part of him long gone and in another (hopefully safer) world.

Saturday, April 27, 2024 8:34 pm - 9:30 pm

[nihkol]

Reflections on Life, 05/21/2024

I’m afraid of drinking my nightly catnip tea because somehow, just somehow, it’s going to propel me back into that murky state of unconsciousness, of unknowing, and then it’s suddenly lights on and repeat.

Sometimes it’s like I want to cry, but there’s a blockage somewhere – does anyone else feel like that? Like the tears are right behind a glass wall, you can see them piling up and you can feel the pressure against the glass on the opposite side. You watch the waves rise and ebb, rise and ebb, and suddenly it shatters-

Sitting in a dark room full of shadows. No light for miles. The last light left half an hour ago, speeding in a red Prius down the highway. Darkness again, for the next 18 hours in purgatory until a brief crack of pleasure appears just for me.

Is it worth staying for such a brief spark of life?

I wish I could stomach alcohol. I wish the water that just slid down my gullet burned and numbed the neural pathways working overtime in my brain. Somewhere in there, a little girl sits with her elbows on her knees, face buried deep. Silence.

I could dig up memories of hatred and longing just to feel something again. Just to break that glass, in case of emergency. The emergency is that I can’t let the tears go. They cling to my soul heavy, viscous, like maple syrup. Sweet in a sickening way.

Please, let anything numb the numbness away. Please let it be free. Drowning in a puddle of my own sorrow is better than letting it fester within, a malady of lostness. I look upwards, to the sky, and see clouds drifting by. They mind their own business. They have no bills to pay. The woods are closing in on me, and I can no longer run away. It is all on me now.

Sometimes it feels like there is another young woman who has come to replace me and is sitting down, typing out these horrid things on a laptop that never really existed. Sometimes it feels like the real me is in a state of limbo somewhere, somewhere no one can reach, only I can. My own personal hell. I wallow in the fog and linger at the restaurants where my old friends used to be – I ride a bicycle down the roads I grew up on and eat from trash cans. The food is forever edible. I sit down, exhausted from the endless trips I take during the day. I sit down on a park bench and lie down to rest. No one will harm me.

Dreadful things like this can’t happen to a person like me. My soul is being torn in two, copy and paste. She lands here in front of the laptop typing furiously like let it all out and I look up, I see the clouds moving without a care in the world and here I stand, a little ant in the middle of little trees in a dollhouse for unseen powers. They move my pawn two squares back and I lose my mind in a cold bathroom. They move my pawn one square forward and suddenly I am floating on cloud nine in a Japanese restaurant. Who is doing this to me? Can you stop?

How do I believe what’s real anymore? I wake up and feel as if I’m living the same day, every day. It suffocates me. It’s a boa constrictor slowly getting closer to my last breath – it salivates over the thought. The thought of destruction, of death. Of my death. I salivate at the thought of- I can’t go that far. It wouldn’t be marketable.

It wouldn’t be who I want to portray myself as to the world. Did that make any sense? No? Too bad. It’s art. It’s what keeps me alive. It’s a wild animal nestled in my chest that has taken flight in earlier years and sat in a cage, frothing at the mouth, during college. It’s clawing for freedom again and I can’t deny it what it wants. Who would I be to do such a thing?

I picture all of the negative things in the world manifesting themselves in my own life – disease, pain, sorrow, misfortune, bankruptcy, failure, disappointment. I would be used to such a world. I would survive, hopefully. And then it’s back to it again tomorrow. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I take the dream of living in the mountains, breathing the mist of angels, between my pointer finger and my thumb and just extinguish it like that. Fuck that. It’ll never happen. And then I sit at my laptop and four hours have passed, I haven’t done a goddamn thing but escape. Escape what? When did I choose this life?

When I sat through endless college promotions in high school and gave up. When I stepped foot on my first college campus and brewed biodiesel in a big container. When I sat in the library and listened to his name on repeat for the first semester. When I hid my fears, my dreams, my humanness in the little cold bathroom and poured it onto many pieces of folder paper without a breath in between. Just me and raw emotion. No one to protect me anymore.

I chose this life and now it feels like I’m running from such an awful thing, a monster it’s become after I neglected it and tore it to shreds day after day out of some twisted sense of control. She looks out the window twenty-seven times a day because it reminds her of the world she’ll never see. Deep down, it’s punishment. But she’s not supposed to know. Can you keep a secret?

Tuesday, May 21, 2024 12:00 am - 12:19 am