loss

This Is Forty-Eight… Forty-Nine?

~ Diary of a Kitten Addict ~ Leave a comment

Another trip around the sun, another year older, and somehow, it still catches me off guard. Birthdays don’t make me sentimental anymore; they make me aware, of time, of motion, of all the ways I’ve changed and stayed the same. Forty-eight feels too young to feel this wise, too old to feel this curious. But here I am, somewhere in between, still learning what it means to live wide open.

Thank you to everyone who took the time yesterday to wish me a happy birthday.
Hard to believe I’m forty-eight… wait, forty-nine? No, forty-eight. I think. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Sometimes I panic when I think about things like, “In 2030, we’ll install new social studies standards.” Not because of the standards, but because of the 2030. I can still remember partying like it was 1999 when it actually was 1999.

I remember being ten, with parents who were forty, and thinking they were ancient. Now, with parents who are seventy-eight and seventy-nine (I’m forty-eight, nailed it; my mum is thirty years older than me), I think about how young they still are and how much time we still have left to travel and explore.

I no longer measure time in minutes and seconds. In frat parties or nightclubs or boys. I think in weeks, months, and years. About retirement plans and portfolios. Menopause and hip replacements. I curse at my phone, send words instead of memes, and laugh because, well, here I am, the person my parents warned me about. The person they swore I’d become.

I went from wild and carefree to achy and crotchety seemingly overnight.
I turn down the music when it’s raining too hard because I can’t see well when it’s too loud. I brace for the “oof” every morning when I crawl out of bed, my knees, hips, and back punishing me for the years I punished them in sports, and in stupid (but also fun) things like Spartan races.
I track BOGO sales at grocery stores and make meal plans instead of eating leftover pizza I found on my dorm room floor or tacos I found under my pillow.
I still love unsensible shoes, but I only wear them when it’s sensible.
I haven’t yet started calling the front desk when the room next door is too loud, but I might have knocked… politely… on the wall once or twice.
And I definitely don’t have TikTok.

Sometimes I stumble across old photos from college, me in my purple plastic skirt, that shiny green jacket (also plastic) I thought made me invincible, and I wish I could tell that girl how beautiful she was before the world convinced her she wasn’t. How thin she was. How unbreakable she’d turn out to be.

I wish I could tell her that strength doesn’t come from holding everything together; it comes from falling apart and finding a way back. That every wound, even the ones that felt fatal, would scab over and diminish in time. That the broken hearts and tear-soaked pillows, the stupid boys and stupid girls and cruel words, would one day shrink down into stories she’d tell with a laugh.

I wish I could tell her the world wasn’t ending every time someone ghosted her, or when she cried herself sick over someone who probably sells insurance in Ohio now and hasn’t explored the Rocky Mountains alone. That those sleepless nights were wasted on people who didn’t deserve to know her favorite songs. That those long nights waiting for the phone to ring were keeping her from hearing herself instead.

And that those wounds, now faint scars, would become the very fabric that built her. How every break had taught her to bend. Sturdy, imperfect, a little frayed in spots, but hers and hers alone. The kind of fabric that softens with time yet still holds up after every wash. The jeans you still wear from high school. The T-shirt that almost smells like him. The thread that runs through every version of herself, binding the girl she was to the woman she became.

If I could, I would pull that thread tight, trace it back to where it started, and I’d find her again, the girl who didn’t yet know what she was made of. I wish I could tell her that one day she’d grow up, be respected, earn a doctorate, and realize the people she once tried so hard to impress no longer even exist in her memory.

I’ve said before that while I have regrets, I don’t live with them, and that still holds true. They’re memories, not weights. Reminders, not anchors.

At forty-eight, I feel lucky to be where I am.

I have a handful of really good friends, the kind who’ve seen me at my worst and still answer the phone at two in the morning if I call in a panic… or a rage… or just because I’m bored. They send me pictures of otters, leave voice memos of themselves singing on my birthday, drop off authentic All Dressed chips on my doorstep, send random memes about leaves and how much the bitches love them, show up at my dissertation defense at eleven o’clock Netherlands time, still cut and style my hair, or jet off for a weekend in Vegas that we still don’t talk about. They visit me in Charlotte when they’re passing through, or maybe just to curl for the weekend, and leave little gifts on my desk because they thought of me and my ridiculous obsession with all things cats.

I have a best friend. The kind who calls when I’m too sad to talk, sits in silence while I cry, and only hangs up once she knows I’m in bed. The kind of friend who travels with me, who knows my darkest secrets, my worst impulses, my deepest fears, and still always shows up. She calls me on my shit but never judges me… at least not too harshly… and she always calls me back.

And I have a partner who celebrates me, ignores my tantrums, and indulges my weird whims. Who takes trips with me on the off chance we might see moosen. Who sometimes makes a steak dinner better than anything Ruth’s Chris or Morton’s is serving up, and who always drives me to the airport when I’m off on another adventure, kisses me goodbye, and reminds me that he loves me.

I’d go to the mattresses for all of them without a second thought, because, frankly, several of them know where the bodies are buried and because without them, I’d be lost.

I have a family that is mostly intact. I’ve felt the loss of matriarchs and patriarchs, of beloved uncles and family friends I once thought of as surrogate parents. Each loss has become a reminder of family itself, of love, of togetherness, of how deeply we belong to one another even as the seats around the table begin to empty.

Despite my general optimism, I’ve started to live more in the now, because I’ve grown acutely aware of borrowed time and the absence of any guaranteed tomorrow. I sometimes wish I’d understood the meaning of family when I was younger, but I’ve come to learn it’s something that has to grow on you over time, like moss… or maybe fungus. You have to grow old to understand what old means. You have to experience loss to comprehend the hollowness it leaves behind. And you cannot fully understand love until you’ve stepped out of the light it once provided. But each loss, in its own way, brings you closer to those who remain in the void and learn to share that space with you.

But through it all, I know I have a place to call home, even if it isn’t brick and mortar or tied to a single point on a map. Sometimes family is forty-seven text notifications bitching about the Penguins’ power play.

Home, like family, isn’t always simple. Love and belonging come with their own messiness, their own friction. Because comfort doesn’t erase complexity. Family, like time, teaches in layers; some soft, some sharp.

I’ve also felt the strain that politics and pride can bring to a family, and I’ve lamented the silliness of those silences. The stubbornness that builds walls where laughter used to live. Yet even those moments have carried lessons. I no longer see myself as a child at the whim of adults trying to mold me, or as an adult bending to other adults who believe they still can. It’s a strange dance. The old and the young, elders and youngers, respect and mutual understanding. Learning to be cautious and kind, yet steadfast, confident, and self-advocating. It has taught me to love without question or condition, and to forgive, but never to cave.

The same lessons have found their way into every other corner of my life, especially my work.

I have a job I enjoy and take pride in, work that still challenges me, that still matters. The kind of work that sometimes keeps me up at night and wears me thin, yet always reminds me I’m part of something bigger than myself, that my days are spent doing something that outlives the hours it takes.

I’ve finished my education as far as degrees go, but the learning hasn’t stopped, it’s just changed shape.
Now it looks like airports and conversations and quiet mornings where the lesson is simply being present.

I travel. I wander. I wonder. I explore.

Not to escape, but to keep learning what it means to be alive in all the small, ordinary ways, because the world keeps getting bigger the older I get, and each place teaches me something new about who I was, who I am, and who I’m still becoming.

Because no matter how far I go, the journey always circles back to me. Every new horizon holding up a mirror, reminding me that growth isn’t just about the miles traveled, but the grace earned along the way.

I still sometimes cry into my pillow, and I know heartache doesn’t fade with age, but I also know it isn’t the end of the world. It just shifts the landscape. And it’s up to me to decide how I want to walk it.

To all the little girls and boys out there, the ones who think thirty or forty is old, just wait. It really does get better with age. You get better with age.

If you have a dream, chase it. If you want to go somewhere, buy the ticket. Money is something you can always make tomorrow, and things just gather dust. Real living happens at the intersection of let’s do it and holy shit, I’m terrified.

So do it scared. Live life on the precipice between caution and the wind. That’s where the good stories come from anyway.

Because that’s the secret no one tells you about getting older, it’s not about slowing down; it’s about finally knowing when to jump.

How to Steal a Cat (and heal a broken heart)

~ Diary of a Kitten Addict ~ 1 Comment

I didn’t set out to steal a cat. Or write a story about it.
I set out to survive the kind of grief that guts you from the inside. The kind that makes you keep seeing shadows that aren’t there and crying in grocery store aisles. In the end I guess that kind of story kind sort of writes itself and then waits for you to recognize it (even if it takes six years) and sit down and get on with it.

This isn’t really a story about theft.
It’s about loss. And love. And the messy, irrational things we do to feel whole again.
It’s about Stuart, the cat who broke my heart by being the best thing in it.
And Stella, the tiny, cross-eyed stowaway who climbed into the hollow he left behind.

Most people think he was named Stu because it was short for stupid. And who knows, maybe at first it was. But for as long as I can remember, across those too-short fifteen years, it was short for Stuart James, named after James Stuart II, my favorite of all the British monarchs (of course I have a favorite monarch).

He was my best friend in more ways than I can explain.

He was weird-looking, lanky, scraggly, even at his healthiest.

He walked on his tiptoes, had a wonky eye, and scars on his nose, lip, and head.

Reminders of a life on the streets, and brushes with death that probably claimed a few of his nine lives before I claimed him as my own.

He was almost all white, except for an orange-ringed tail and a few scattered orange patches across his back and head.

And he was loyal.

He knew all my stories. I won’t pretend he didn’t judge me…he was a cat, after all, and judging is innate to his kind, regardless of his judgy nature, he loved me unconditionally. And he never told a soul the deepest, darkest secrets I whispered to him at night.

He was quirky in the way only soulmates are. He did this thing I’ve never seen another cat do. He would jump straight from the ground into my arms. Not in the slow, climbing way kittens do on Instagram reels. No. He’d pace in front of me, mewing, while I patted my chest and asked, “Wanna come up?” He’d pace some more, maybe complain a little louder, and then…leap. A full five-foot arc, right into my open arms.

I thought it was a magic trick. Sure, dogs do it. Kids do it. (even educated bees do it?) But cats? Cats don’t perform. They do what they want, when they want. For Stu, that leap was the ultimate act of trust, me, trusting he wouldn’t claw the shit out of my chest, and him, trusting I’d catch him every time.

He was also, hands down, one of the most expensive things I’ve ever owned, aside from my house and current car. I’m pretty sure his vet bills totaled more than my first car. There were at least three emergency vet visits: urinary blockages, a chewed lily leaf (how that didn’t kill him, I’ll never know), and various death-defying stunts. But every time, the vet would say, “He can make it if we treat him.” And how do you say no to that?

As much as I loved him, I’ll admit it. I get mad about it sometimes. Pets are heartbreak by design. I can’t remember which comedian said it, but the bit went something like: “Look, kids…a puppy! In fifteen years it’s going to break your heart and crush your soul.”

We don’t deserve pets.
And they don’t stay long enough.
As fate would have it, they stay just long enough to become a permanent part of your soul.
And then they die.
And you get a little box of ashes to keep in your china cabinet.
(At least that’s where I keep mine)
Maybe you get a ceramic paw print too—someone smashes their dead paw into clay before they set them on fire.
It’s absurd.
It’s tender.
It’s cruel.

I watched him grow old. In the last few months, I could see him fading. Slow down. He stopped jumping into my arms. He didn’t even pace for it anymore. He just watched me, his body still trying to obey the instincts that had always made him bold, but the strength wasn’t there. I started letting him come outside with me. He never wandered, just found a sunny patch of grass and curled into it like he was part of the earth itself. He moved slower. Slept longer. Ate less. No matter his age, he still followed me to bed. Our bed is high, raised up on a platform that takes a small leap even for a healthy cat. But somehow, every night, he made it. He’d settle between our pillows, tuck himself close, and stay there all night. In the morning, he’d stretch his paws out, touch my nose, and meet my eyes with that same quiet knowing he always had.

That was my life for fifteen years.

I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.
Some deep feeling inside me.
Maybe it was just because he looked tired.

His body was thin, almost brittle. His breathing was shallow, less… like a clock winding down. Each tick growing further apart. A countdown you can hear and feel. One you try to ignore.

His fur wasn’t matted, but it was off. Dry, unkempt. He had lost his shine.
And his eyes, they were still soulful, still saw into me, but there was something else in them now.
A pleading. A knowing.

And as I looked into his eyes, I saw it.

And I knew.

This was our last night.

He curled into the crook of my arm, like always. I cued up our playlist, The Droge & Summers Blend, a song called Two of the Lucky Ones, was on first. It was one of his favorites.

I pulled him closer to me and I started to cry.

As Peter Droge sang by the light of a setting sun I whispered “You can go now baby. Mama will be ok if you need to go. I’ll be ok, I’ll be ok, I’ll be ok…”

The next morning, we woke to find he had wet the bed between our pillows. He didn’t try to hide it. Didn’t move from it. He didn’t look ashamed, he just looked… finished. He had listened. And I had promised. 

So I called our vet. I made the appointment.

When the time came, I held him through both injections.
I held him after the vet whispered, “He’s gone.”
I kept holding him while my body shook and the tears fell in heavy, soaking drops.

T stood beside me, close but not touching.
He was sobbing too.
But I think he knew, if he touched me, I would collapse.
I was tethered to this limp, lifeless body, and I wasn’t ready to let go.

T whispered, “He loved you so much.”

I cried so hard the vet tech cried too.
Even Dr. Plott cried.
I didn’t stop crying for days.

(I’m crying now as I write…and rewrite this.
I don’t cry less with each version.
I’ve come to accept this will always hurt.)

Time doesn’t heal all wounds.
That’s bullshit.
That’s what people say when they don’t know what else to say.
When you’re sobbing over a cat and your grief makes them uncomfortable.

I loved that fucking cat. And when he left, it felt like someone reached inside me and took the part I hadn’t realized was holding everything else together. My world cracked wide open. I couldn’t speak his name without breaking. I couldn’t sit in the places he used to sleep. I couldn’t bear the silence.

And then… came a text.

Two days after I held Stuart for the last time, I was still crying in waves, grief arriving in strange, sharp bursts, like my body kept remembering what my heart already knew.

The text was from a friend. No context. Just a photo of a tiny, somewhat cross-eyed Siamese kitten with huge, ridiculous blue eyes and ears too big for her head. Below it, a message:

“I know you just lost Stu… but do you want a kitten?”

I stared at the picture for a long time. I felt guilty just looking at it. Like even entertaining the thought was some kind of betrayal. I hadn’t vacuumed up his fur yet. I hadn’t showered, but I had at least washed the bedding. His dish was still in its place.

But the ache inside me was unbearable. My arms felt too empty.

So I replied: “No”.

But, I couldn’t get that picture out of my mind. That tiny kitten looking up at the camera, eyes slightly crossed, ears like satellite dishes, fur too thin to be impressive but thick enough to whisper potential. She wasn’t cute in the obvious way. She was awkward and wild-eyed. Desperate, maybe. But also… cavalier.

Like she was saying: Come get me if you want. If not? I’ll figure it out.

I stared at it again that night. And again the next morning.

I showed T the picture and said, “Can you believe Heather? We don’t want a kitten right now…”

I didn’t respond for three days.

I kept telling myself no.
No, because I wasn’t ready.
No, because she wasn’t him.
No, because I hadn’t even vacuumed. His dish was still there.
His favorite food, Mixed Grill, was still sitting on the counter.
And I still cried every time I walked into the bedroom and settled in without him.

And because I was still seeing him in the periphery, in the margins. Like a comment from an editor I wasn’t ready to read. This heavy reminder of unfinished business. Something that might one day become just a footnote, but for now it lingered and it demanded attention.

The white fake lilies Morgan bought me as a joke would catch the corner of my eye, and for a split second, that flash of white… it was him.

But the picture haunted me (as if I wasn’t haunted enough)—and gave me hope.
I’d open it and stare. Close it. Open it again.
That little punk cat wouldn’t blink.

Finally, I broke.

“Where is she?” I texted.

Heather replied immediately, like she’d been waiting for it.

“At my mom’s camp in the mountains. She just wandered up and she’s worried the stray dogs are going to kill her.”

She sent another picture. Cuter than the last.

Oh…
Well…
Shit.

Now it wasn’t just a maybe-kitten. It was a maybe-murdered kitten.
A potentially soon-to-be tragic-eyed ghost I would also carry around in my chest cavity for the next decade if I didn’t at least try.

The moral math didn’t make sense. I was grieving. I was still crying in the grocery store. I hadn’t cooked, hadn’t slept, hadn’t gone a full day without whispering “I miss you” to a patch of carpet.

But this wasn’t about being ready. It was about not being able to live with myself if I didn’t do something.

I went back to T with the new picture.

He looked at it, nodded slowly. “Yeah… it’s a kitten. And it’s cute.”

I stared at him. “Do we want a kitten?”

He didn’t hesitate. “It’s up to you, babe. I know how bad you’re still hurting.”

I rationalized. “I think Rooney’s lonely. She misses Stu… she needs a friend.”

T raised an eyebrow. “Rooney is fine.”

I wasn’t deterred. “I mean… she seems really sad, doesn’t she? Doesn’t she seem lonely? That’s depression, right?”

He didn’t answer.

So I tried again. “Do you want a kitten?”

He just repeated, soft and steady: “It’s up to you.”

Which, of course, meant: I will support whatever your broken, irrational heart decides to do—even if it means a day trip to the mountains to rescue a stray kitten that probably doesn’t need rescuing. 

We thought she was a stray. Unwanted, unclaimed, a little ghost scratching out an existence around a camp in the mountains of North Carolina. Heather’s mom had found her, said the wild dogs were circling– the kitten wouldn’t last much longer. That was all we knew. That was all I needed to know.

I texted Heather, “Fine. Tell Beth we’ll take her.”

As luck would have it, Beth and Pampa were already heading to South Carolina the next day. She said she could meet us on the way down from the mountains. We picked a Chick-Fil-A in Gastonia. Neutral territory, almost halfway for both of us. Public enough to not feel like a shady animal deal, but not so busy that anyone would ask questions.

So we packed the cat carrier. Gassed up the car. Started driving.

It felt a little ridiculous, even in the moment. Like we were on some noble quest to rescue a lost soul while trying to heal mine. But I didn’t care. I needed something to pour my grief into. I needed something I could save.

T drove. It was quiet. I stared out the window, thinking about how recently I’d made this same kind of drive, but in reverse. From the vet’s office. Without Stuart. With every mile, I doubted myself. I wasn’t ready. But I was already going.

Beth met us in the parking lot, kitten in hand. She was tiny, smaller than I expected. All ears and eyes and fragile limbs, folded into Beth’s arms like a secret.

“I’m so glad you’re taking her,” she said.

I took the kitten carefully, holding her close like she might vanish if I didn’t keep her pressed to me. We made the usual small talk, said thanks, and loaded her into the carrier. I climbed into the back seat beside her. Left the carrier door open. Kept my hand inside.

On the ride home, T kept glancing back at us in the rearview mirror.

“I’ve thought of a name,” he said.

I was sort of shocked. It had taken us weeks to name Rooney. T had been calling her Dan the Adventure Cat when she was still feral in our backyard. Because, as he told me, “all outdoor stray cats are male”. I didn’t get the logic, but I didn’t deny him the fantasy. And when we realized Dan was, in fact, a she, we went through a whole series of terrible almost-names: Chicken. Danielle. Kitten Butt.

Nothing stuck.

Then one day I made the leap—from Dan to Dan Rooney. The Steelers. Pittsburgh.
I remember yelling it down the hall from the toilet:

“ROONEY! We should call her Rooney!”

And that was that. Dan the Adventure Cat, became and is still known to this day as: Dan “the Adventure Cat” Rooney.

So for T to have a name within ten minutes of picking up a kitten we were not prepared for or even sure we wanted…that was impressive.

“Stella Blue,” he said. “You know, because she has blue eyes.”

T’s a Grateful Dead fan. It made sense.

And just like that, she had a name.

Stella. Our new baby.

She didn’t hiss. Didn’t scratch. Just stared. Still wide-eyed. Still that strange blend of desperate and defiant. Like she was thinking, You got me? Fine. Just don’t fuck it up.

When we got home, I decided she needed a bath. She’d been living under a porch, allegedly. Surely she had fleas, mites, worms—something.

I started to run the water and reached to lift her, but then I noticed… she wasn’t dirty. Her coat was clean. Her ears were clear. She didn’t smell like garbage or wet leaves. She didn’t even flinch when I touched her feet.

And then I saw it.

A faint line around her neck.

A collar line.

“T,” I called. “Come here. Look at this.”

He stood beside me, and I pointed. That perfect little imprint. The one you only get from something worn too long to forget.

“This cat was wearing a collar.”

And right then it hit me. It hit us.

I said, “Oh my God.”
T said, “Beth stole this cat.”
We both said,  “And we helped her.”

I made T text Heather.

“Ask her where the cat came from. Don’t let her skip the details. We know the truth”

That’s when we got the whole story.

Apparently, the kitten had wandered up to Beth’s camper and started hanging out under the porch. She’d been wearing a flea collar, one of those cheap, one-size-fits-all kinds. But it was too tight. And whoever had put it on her hadn’t bothered to cut off the excess length, so she was just dragging around six inches of loose collar behind her like a tail extension.

Beth said she was afraid it would get snagged on something and choke her.

So she cut it off.

Which is when, I suppose, she decided the kitten was now hers.
Either to keep, or to give away.

And since she opted for Doorway Number Two…

By extension…ours.

That first week, we kept Stella quarantined in our bedroom.
Just to be safe.
We didn’t want her passing anything to Rooney. We had a vet appointment scheduled, but they couldn’t see us until the following Monday.

It felt responsible, like we were pretending to be people who knew what the hell they were doing.
We’d had cats before…
Just not stolen ones.

So it also felt dangerous.
Because what if she was microchipped?
What if someone had reported her missing?
Or worse…
stolen?

What if by taking her to the vet, we were writing our own ticket to jail?

We lived mostly normal lives during this time, but occasionally one of us would muse outloud, “do they arrest people for stealing cats?”, “since we didn’t cross state lines, this isn’t a federal crime right?”, “what if her owner wants her back?”

I think that’s what scared me more than anything. Not the jail, because surely they’d throw Beth in jail, not us, I mean we were just recipients of stolen goods, not the stealers, so what, probation? Community service? I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with though was giving her back. It would be a devastating loss at this point added to an already tattered and barely surviving soul.

Because in truth, the past week had been a mix of healing vibes and guilt filled grief. Each night I went to sleep in the master and T in the guest room. That way neither Stella or Rooney were alone. I spent the first week falling asleep with my hand in Stu’s spot and Stella curled up on my chest, tucked under my chin. I didn’t sleep much. I’m a side sleeper and she was too damn cute to move. It was like she knew what was broken inside of me and she laid there, on my heart, not for her comfort, but for mine. 

When the vet finally saw her, it was Dr. Plott again, he confirmed what we’d already suspected: Stella was in perfect health.
No fleas. No mites. Some worms.
Clear eyes. Good weight.
Friendly enough, considering.

She also wasn’t microchipped (she is now).

Thank God for small favors.
At least there was no proof of our crime.

I might have panicked for a moment when Dr. Plott asked, “where did you get her? You don’t see many Siamese strays.” But I managed to stammer out some “oh you know, a friend found her wandering about” response.

I brought her home, relieved, triumphant, and yes, still guilty and broken. 

Yet, every night, I would crawl into bed with this stranger, this new kitten, and that was essential.

Not because I knew her.
Not because she’d earned it.
But because something had to fill the hollow.
Because the silence was too loud.
Because she curled into the space where Stuart used to sleep and didn’t flinch when I cried.

She was soft, and small, and steady.
And even if she wasn’t him, she was here.
And that was something.

This became my routine for about nine months. We were still in the pandemic and I was still working from home. She slept with me at night, sat on my shoulder while I worked or chewed on my papers. She snuggled up with me on the couch when she wasn’t sitting on Rooney or tormenting her as we made and ate dinner and let the day wind down.

I started to heal. I cried less and less. Sometimes I actually put on Stu’s Jams or scrolled through my pictures because I was afraid I was losing him, I was afraid I was letting go, and despite what grace she had given me, I wasn’t ready for her to take his place. 

In the end, Stella made that decision for me. I went back to work and T started working from home. She went from snuggling with me to lounging on him during our evenings, and sleeping exclusively with him. She pulled away first. It was like she knew she had done her job, her services were rendered, and she didn’t owe me anything else. Now she was free to make her own decisions and play by her own rules. To this day she loves him more. I’m ok with that, even though I complain about it often and openly. She sasses me when I pick her up, I swear her meow sounds like “noooooo”. But every so often, she still comes into the bedroom, crawls up on my chest and lays on the heart she once helped me heal. 

Love letter

~ Diary of a Kitten Addict ~ Leave a comment

My love,

This began as a story. A story of us. A way for me to get it all out and rationalize what I am feeling. A way to combat the sleepless, longing and lonely nights without you in my arms. Then I realized it’s just too personal and I realized it isn’t a story, it’s a letter. A letter to you. To the man that I have come to know and come to love and come to need. I have to write this. I have to write this because I know that what we have can’t be sustained. I know that what we have will fade and tatter and slowly flutter away because the odds are stacked against us. The world doesn’t want this for us. And deep down, in places we don’t talk about at parties, we don’t want this for us. But there is a place in my heart, a place so deep in my soul that no one before and no one after will ever know but you, that I want this. So our story is now a letter; a love letter, to you. I’ve never written one like it before. I’ll never write another like it again.

There are moments. And then there are moments. You never know where you’ll be when lightning strikes and you can never be prepared for it. As a young girl I grew up watching Rom Coms; Julia Roberts being swept off her feet by a bazillionaire, saved from a torrid life on the streets, Meg Ryan hiding in a closet listening to talk radio and being rescued by Tom Hanks on top of the Empire State Building. These movies. These fantasies. They aren’t reality. I’m 41. I’ve never danced in the rain while Frank Sinatra sang in the background. I’ve never had a secret rendezvous on a mega yacht or a skyscraper or even a house in the suburbs for that matter. To put it quite bluntly, I’ve never been swept off my feet. When I was a little girl my mom didn’t lock me in my closet when I was bad and I didn’t have to fantasize that Prince Charming would come charging in, arm raised to rescue me. In fact, when the time came for us to have the “talk”, you know the one about birds and bees and the fact that a stork didn’t actually drop me on my expectant parents doorstep one night, my mom simply said this, “honey, sex isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”. Now that is parenting at it’s finest. And that my darling, left a lasting impression.

So, I grew up. Watching tv, watching movies, listening to power ballads about love and loss, living in reality but hoping in secret fantasy. Desperately wishing that one day Prince Charming would come rescue me. Day dreaming about boys and a life less than ordinary while keeping my feet on the ground and my eyes on the prize. I’ve never been one to settle. I’m goal-oriented, I’m practical. And yet, when it came to love, I was a disaster. I always found myself falling hard and fast for the first person that gave me any attention. I always settled. Tell me you love me. Tell me fast. Or else I’ll lose interest. And I remember, I remember so clearly that feeling when I got what I wanted. It was so empty. It was so shallow. I had broken another one down. I had gotten what I wanted and I was out. There were no fireworks. There was no tingling sensation in the pit of my stomach. There was no flutter in my heart. There was no stirring in my soul.

Now, to be fair, I’m an antsy individual. ADHD to a fault. I can’t sit still. I’m fidgety, I’m on edge, I’m constantly in motion and on the go. I don’t sleep for more than two to three hours a night. I always laugh it off and say, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’, but deep down I’d kill for a solid eight-hours. Deep down I wish I could shut my mind off, I wish I could just relax. Even in my writing I’m all over the place, stream of consciousness…Jack Kerouac and Burroughs watch out, ‘cause you got competition from this girl. See what I mean? There I go again… Anyway, I had this storm raging inside me. This duality. I was this level, grounded, focused, and driven person to the outside world, but on the inside, on the inside I was a tumult of emotion and desire. A tossing and turning sea of wants and needs and dreams. I’d lay awake at night and have the most epic adventures. Pirates. Monsters under my bed. Bad guys who needed thwarted. Secret plots to overthrow the government. Distant shores. Love that left me speechless. Each night was a new story and a new chance at feeling alive. Sometimes, if I liked the plot-line I had created enough I could keep a fantasy going for days, even weeks. Usually these tales involved stolen moments and secret kisses. Kissing that involved someone grabbing my face with both hands and breathing me in. Kissing that made my stomach flip and my hands tingle. Kissing that left me breathless and wanting more. Always. Wanting. More. It was a song on the wind, Elvis Costello’s She and some guy who said “this is you babe, this is what you make me feel”,

She may be love that cannot hope to last, may come to me from shadows in the past, that I’ll remember till the day I die. The meaning of my life is she.

It was always some guy who just drank me in. Saw me in my entirety. And as I waited, and hoped, and dreamed, I became more and more jaded.

I didn’t get that. I got fists and anger and rage. I got accusations and jealousy and judgment. I got demands and ultimatums and truths I didn’t want to hear. I got stifled. I got put down. I got let down. I got jaded. And so I hardened myself to the world. I hardened myself to love. I stopped believing. I stopped dreaming. I stopped hoping. I stopped wishing. I stopped feeling. I settled. I picked guys who didn’t use their fists to wear me down. Who didn’t make my life difficult. I settled time and time again for men who thought they loved me and I’m sure did, in their own way. But deep down, I had given up. I had given up hope and I had given up my dreams. Somewhere, way back when, the little girl who dreamt of a love that the moon and the stars would lie down and be still for, stopped dreaming.

Then I met you. And baby, that little girl came alive. All of a sudden. All at once. Screaming and beating on the walls of my psyche to be set free and let go. Open to possibility. Wanting beyond what I ever thought was possible to desire. Begging me to let you in and let her have a chance. A chance at a life. A chance at a life less than ordinary. A life of kisses that left her wanting. A life of being seen and heard and loved so completely and so thoroughly that there are moments when she is left breathless and stunned and so completely overwhelmed that she can’t move. And so I did, I let you in and I let her out. You have awakened in me something I never thought was possible. You are that dream. You have renewed my faith for all the little girls led astray by life and movies and music. You have shown me that there is such a thing as wild abandon and fantasy.

So you see my love,  I needed to tell you. I needed to let you know, that despite what happens, despite the fact that I know this will end. That you have saved me. That you have opened my heart and my soul to a set of possibilities and wonders I long ago stopped believing existed.

Thank you.

I love you. Very simply. Very true.