At home alone one evening this week, I witnessed a visual phenomena that was almost inexplicable and frightening. However, I able to perceive exactly what it was and I laughed. Laughter was not the appropriate response because I later learned what appeared to be a solitary micro-feather floating down from an air-conditioning vent in the ceiling was later captured by a worker in my house when he came upon it resting in a shadowy place, it was a brown recluse spider. He had made his nearly invisible descent on a smaller than hair size strand of silk and took off as soon as he touched the floor. I knew it was a spider but not being afraid of them thought nothing of it at the time. When it was caught in a plastic baggie, I could see him more clearly and identified him as the creature I had seen, nearly invisible once his body blended into the floor, and wondered at how easily he could kill a human if he wanted to. Life can be that fragile.
The approaching of death certainly takes many forms, most of them unrecognizable. Perhaps for some it is a cigarette, others an alcoholic drink, for another, too much food, and for yet another, not enough food. Then there are writers with their unique brand of symptoms: brilliant clarity of thought that may be incorrect, racing thoughts, hearing voices that are not present, insomnia, and drug abuse, although these symptoms are not limited to writers. More refined symptoms include the irresistible seduction of anorexia in its creative expressions. They all seem so true and real but I have been told by doctors that they are not. Writers never seem to be on the right side of the answers to the True or False Questions of life and often times fail the tests life administers to them. I think it is ironic I get better at failing the older I become.
I rail against the demise of my Blyss borzois, all of them are gone now. LTR walked me through it when he was here but then he misstepped and was gone. People in my life were happy about these events of last summer. This indicates how well my family knows me or cares, or understands. It borders on the criminal in their degree of torture to me when they speak. I give them the benefit of the doubt that they really just don’t understand me at all and still try to go on loving them.
At this dawn of 2015 I cannot hope for an encore life, but a continuation of what went before with some adjustments to the side of corrections made. I will not have another five or six borzoi, just one. My anorexia will be replaced by a healthy diet and a more realistic body image even if I hate myself that way. I cannot believe my own inner voice when it speaks to me about myself. I am somehow wrong about me, the most important thing.
Once my new borzoi bitch, Jelly, comes it will not matter because she will matter more. Moreover, some kind of peace has fallen upon LTR and me for which I am grateful. I do not have a name or label for it, so I will simply acknowledge it by saying that he is back. After all, he captured the brown recluse spider before it could bite me.