Saturday, Sept. 21, 2024 - 12:00 pm.
The grief and the stress are taking a toll on me today, these days. Thankfully we had a week off work due to independence day celebrations, and it's been the first week off I've had in a year or so in which I get to stay home. I've been using my vacation periods to travel to my home country, which has been great, but I also appreciate staying home.
Nevetherless, it's never a vacation for me. I spent three and a half days of this free week working. Academia sucks in that regards, because everything I was doing was in fact needed for next week. This is what I mean by grief and stress. Not even after losing Sun was I able to rest and grieve, even though it was a fucking month of leave. A whole fucking month of crying while I wrote a research grant proposal because it's part of my job and the deadline was right after my leave of absence came to an end.
I'd planned on having some spare time this week to write and do creative stuff. I feel like part of what I feel so emotionally overwhelmed right now is because I have this raging storm inside of me and without a proper tool to ride it. Instead I just cry here and there. And I didn't get to write nor do creative stuff.
I can feel right now how I'm on the verge of tears, and the back of my head hurts which is a telling sign. I have a broken jaw and stress makes me clench all the muscles until they pull those at the back of my head, neck and shoulders.
I try to be mindful about why I'm hurting: it's another round of dates to observe. Sun turned 10 months old yesterday, and yesterday we also drove by the neighborhood he lives in, on our way to a friend's house out in the country. We met him on the 22nd, he came home on the 24th, and our ginger cat died on that same date months later.... I feel I say all this in every entry. But I do that, don't I? Go round and round the things that hurt me. When Joseph dumped me (in 2008? Another lifetime!), I spent years going around the subject with my heart destroyed beyond recognition.
(In my defense, his dumping me was news in development for years and I was keeping track of it all, as I kept discovering shit from "oh, he meant we were breaking up" to "oh, it's because he's living with this gal 'from his past' that he'll end up marrying and having a child with". And he did. At the time, it fucked me up to the point of making me burst a nerve in my eye or stop driving to throw up on the side of a road. But in retrospective, it was quite a ride).
Look, I got distracted and the emotional turmoil went away for a bit.
But I'm also overwhelmed by Bert... who now goes by Lando, because Andrew's a Formula 1 fan, and we thought the name fit the cat. I'm overwhelmed because he can't see Marla without chasing her and jumping to attack her. I can deal with his mad goblin mode, but not with him hurting my other cat.
I know I say this in every other entry too, but now I can appreciate the 13 years of history we have with Marla. And which we had with Nico too. I'll speak like Nico is around: these cats just melt in our arms. They come looking for us in any room, they read us like we read them, they're unfazed by any move we make because they know they're safe with us.
There's trust and a certain peace to our relationship with these two cats that comes with age and love and care. And patience! We forget that Marla and Nico came to us each as a three-month-old kitten, and they were once manic goblins too, doing stuff like trying to snatch our food from the table or our mouths. I lose my temper with Lando sometimes but I remember it takes a lot of patience and compassion (and toys and scratching posts) to socialize a cat. We were told a somewhat optimistic story about his upbringing, but it was also very vague and who the fuck knows.
I think our relationship with Marla has helped with our current situation somehow, because she still comes out after being cornered by Lando. I cry sometimes and ask her to forgive me for bringing in such a stressful situation; I feel like I'm failing her, after already failing Nico big time. But her behaviors haven't changed, from eating, grooming, using the litterbox, to wanting to be with us, to sleeping in our bed.
She already spends a lot of time in our bedroom, in her spot in the windowsill. When she comes out of the bedroom, even after being chased out of her other territories (i.e., the rest of the apartment)... when she does that, the way she carries herself around the apartment is like she says "I do live here and these two giant apes got my back".
They do have their moments of restrainted tolerance towards one another. We were already hoping for this as the better outcome of bringing in a new cat, knowing that Marla is very territorial herself. She and Nico cuddled for a couple of months when they were babies, but then they just became tangent lines, existing next to one another for 13 years. They went through everything together though: moving six times, including to another continent, fostering puppies and kittens, Andrew and I dissapearing for days (on trips) but always coming back for them, etc.
So we just gotta keep being the best giant apes we can for these two cats.
On that note, I'll stop here. I still feel a bit afflicted but as the song from that good ol' man goes, all things must pass. Maybe it'll help if I do something creative.
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