i can't get over my cat

My latest mental trick is to stare out my bedroom window at the cars passing by below and watch the sun's glimmer reflect off various parts of the passing cars. In my aggrieved, childlike imagination, I've wished that if I stare long enough that the reflected light will somehow break apart like a big bang and reform the molecules that made up my cat, then deposit him back to the foot of my bed. It's not as though I'm surprised this hasn't happened- yet it's always disappointing when it doesn't work.

Before that trick I tried purchasing a lot of DVDs hoping that by immersing myself in fantasy and theatrics that maybe I'd get so lost that when I finally got found I'd find him lying in his favorite spot in my bedroom, looking at me like he thought I'd lost my mind. In 4 months I've purchased over 100 new and used DVDs. CVS has $1.99 movies, some of them very good. None of them have delivered the hope or the cat I've lost.

iTunes has made a bundle off of me. Never shop when you're grieving or starved. They saw me coming. I've tried to apply the same principle as I did with the cars, downloading music and reminiscing deeply while staring off into his photos, hoping for that star trek like trick to materialize his body back here. I long to feel him slung around my shoulder, wearing me like a garment, with his head nestled up into my neck, eyes closed, my heart beating in rhythm to the sound of his breathing. Some days I feel suffocated by the air he once breathed.

There's more, so very much more, and I'd love to go on but he's not coming back no matter the desperate state of my reality.

His ashes are in a plain cedar box. In another, longer, box painted with ornate designs are some of his whiskers, a tooth, a small patch of fur, and my whole heart.

posted some time in march, 2008 secret message here: it's been almost 14 months. oh my dear little maui, with all my heart and all my soul, I miss you and it hurts terribly. i would love you and do it all over again if i had that chance.