The kittens make bathing both cute and impossible. Clem spends most of her time trying to catch, and eat, the bubbles. She also becomes inordinately angry with my toes peeking above the water line, and bats at them testily. Brekkie stands worriedly on the edge of the tub staring at me with his large, round eyes. He’s always uncomfortable when I’m near water. He becomes friendlier, and cries pitifully, like I’m going to drown and deprive him of all the attention he never wants when I’m not near water. He likes to be rubbed through the shower curtain. A full-body prophylactic is the only way he’ll tolerate the pets. They both swat my razor, taking turns sending it tumbling in to the soapy water. Both getting shaving cream on their noses and whiskers, which is adorable, and probably tastes just awful. Afterward, they both run to their kibble bowls and wolf down whatever is left, as if they had just finished something really exhausting, and need more fuel to make it through the rest of the day.
It has been ages since I shaved, and by that I mean probably two weeks. I’ve been so cold. The heat works sporadically, and seemingly never at all on the coldest mornings, and even when it is working just fine, I can’t shake the chill that is in my bones. I don’t know if it is my allergies, or how I’ve been on and off Georging for two weeks now, but I can’t seem to ever be warm enough to be able to shave without cutting off all my goosebumps first. Today at Target, I fingered lovingly some plushy blankets wondering if I should buy them, thinking that I cannot have too many blankets, can I? It was probably 75° outside when I was having that thought.
Lately, I feel so old. My conversations with Frijole are filled with the aches and pains of an old person. I swear I’m peri-menopausal, and I have a suspicion I brought this dreaded condition upon myself by getting fixed. There’s not a lot of literature on the correlation between tubal ligation and early onset menopause, but there’s enough to make me think that I am not making this shit up. The misery of George—how he weighs in my stomach, bloating my abdomen and making me feel like my uterus is trying to give birth to itself, but the blood just doesn’t appear. Then it suddenly will, flowing so fast and hard that I am exhausted and shaky; other times it trickles like something old and ancient visiting me from a long time ago, leaving me confused and demanding it to leave me alone already. There are the night sweats and fuzzy memory, like I’m back on my mood stabilizers, but I’m not! This just won’t do, but there it is. My old-lady problems.
Even my house sounds old. The clicking of the clocks in my living room and my bathroom ticking off the seconds ever so slightly out of synch with each other. It reminds me of dimly lit summer days spent indoors at various relatives’ houses of my youth. Time spinning out slowly as the dust motes drifted in the shaft of sun coming through barely parted blinds. Why were my relatives’ houses always so dark? My sister and I were the in-between generation—all our cousins ten years older or younger than us, leaving us to fiend for ourselves in musty spare rooms, sitting on polyester comforters watching Star Trek from the 60s, and listening to the clocks punctuating the silence. That’s how my house sounds to me. Even when I’m in bed with CSP, his strong arms around me, a hand cupping my hip, and I feel content even as my body is rebelling against me, I hear those damn clocks, and fret.
None of this is helped by my current reading material. A Visit From the Goon Squad is making me feel like I should keep looking behind me to see if I can make out the shadows of the ravages of time upon my body, my mind, my friends. Or, perhaps it was the mistake of going to see Shame last night. Though, my mind keeps skittering over the actual point of the movie, and landing on that huge cock of Michael Fassbender (who, shockingly, is two years younger than me—which is not helping me feel any younger, but the lines in his face do remind me that my face is aging slower than my stupid womb would suggest).
Oh, well, fuck it. I’m not alone, and there’s a lot to be said for that.
