The sun set tonight like an embarrassed pumpkin, its carved face, with toothy smile and triangle eyes, turned away. The moon was nowhere to be seen, but I knew it was blanched. Howsoever the day could have gone, it wound up the way it did because of how it actually went. Today was a bad, bad day. So of course I decided to start my first-ever official web log by talking about it. Perhaps I believe that there’s nowhere but up to go from here, but I’m not sure I’ve ever believed that wholeheartedly.

Right now, less than two miles away, my partner’s feline companion of the last seventeen years is in hospital. Her organs are failing, one by one, and yesterday she was quite literally on the edge of death. She was severely dehydrated, despite having drank an extraordinary amount of water. I was called home from work to meet my beloved at the hospital, knowing only that her cat – our cat, now – had collapsed and become almost entirely unresponsive.

I arrived at the hospital to find my beloved in tears, choking on the understanding of what was happening, nearly inarticulate with grief. Since she’d gotten her, my partner’s cat had never once been ill. Through seventeen years she’d been a sweet, mellow, kindly cat who deeply bonded with the family. When I met her, a mere two years and some months ago, she warily but openly accepted me as the new beau in her person’s life. It took little time for me to come to love her. There are some pictures of me with the cat in my lap that now bear a huge emotional weight for me. I really don’t know how I will ever accept that I had so little time to know her. It’s just not fair. And it kills me, thinking too just how bad it is for my partner, who even now is drifting in and out of sleep brought on by the emotional overload.

Today, after having been administered fluids and given a warming pad to rest on all last night, our cat was somewhat more responsive during our visit, though she could still not move her hind legs and had difficulty holding her head up and her gaze steady at the same time. In its way, her coming around that much seemed to be a somewhat cruel twist. It gave us a moment of hope, you see. We knew, truly, that it was not a hope we should entertain or hold on to, but we felt it nonetheless as we carried the weight of it all, all the poignancy and enormity as crushing as a landslide.

To think, my own mother is even now going through nearly the same process as our cat, as if they are somehow symbolically related in time and event. And this is where I pause, look up and out of the bedroom window at the darkness beyond, listen to the constant and seemingly meaningless rush of the freeway’s traffic, and waver on the edge of a huge hole opened up in me. I’m posting mainly about our cat, my beloved’s longest lasting friend, while inside I recognize that my mother – that complicated, maddenning, loving and often kind-beyond-her-means woman – may well be taking her very last breaths tonight. Were I to really give myself over to the consideration of the ridiculously painful reality of it, I would not be able to write at all. Were I then to consider that my father is steadily following my mother’s lead….

Well, this is the time of the year when, it is said by some pagans, the veil between the world of the living and that of the dead grows thinnest. This is the time I have chosen to start this blog. Considering everything immediate and mediate and otherwise in the media, all that is imminent, passing and past, it makes sense for me to start this now. I am nearing forty years old, myself, and am rather too aware of just how quickly the time goes, and, by extension, how soon the end of it comes.

This marks the end of all the energy I have to write with tonight.