thesarahscope

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What a strange year it is? What a strange summer? Yet aren’t all summers the same when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it? That’s what I thought a week ago. We believed a couple of months ago that things were starting to look up, but it was stacked carefully as porcelain plates and too tall. I think we all knew within ourselves that this wasn’t it, yet. This had all been the smaller tropical storm before the hurricane that would go on record.

It all started to fall apart that day in the backyard when I watched one of my bluejays slain right before my eyes. K. says it was two months prior to that, but I first became aware that morning. It happened steps away from me, and I couldn’t stop crying all day…all week…all month. I was taken with the bluejays because they raucously ruled the backyard with their loud caws, flying down the creek every night like some bird gang. All the smaller birds made room on the feeders and got on the ground to eat the overflow when the bully bluejays came to feed.

That particular morning, I was sitting in a chair and a blue jay was eating from the ground, I’d say two wide steps in front of me. I started up a video to capture him. As I watched him through the camera, a black cloud eclipsed him, and I realized that the bluejay and I had been caught unaware by the neighborhood feral cat. I covered my mouth, the surprise of it at all as I sobbed and the bluejay sang his last few chirps from inside the cat’s mouth who was carrying him down to the creek. What I didn’t tell anyone when talking about it, is that my neural pathway to the night my cat Dimitri died lit up like Vegas’ neon. I wanted to scream that night and the morning of the bluejay. I am fortunate enough to have had little grief in my life. I only know that when I saw those soft, slumped heavy bodies, it felt like fire coursing through my veins. It made me want to scream up to the ceiling, right through my roof, to a galaxy so far from here that when it arrived, my voice would have been stripped raw and silent, merely an idea left. That’s how it felt the night Dimitri died, and I fell to my knees and my forehead on the ground and trying to push it all back to before. Then, comes the echoing ache when you realize you can’t push it back, and you are now to try to figure out how to live with it. I felt sick to my stomach over the bluejay, though, because he had let his guard down because of me. His guard was on me with my stupid fucking phone videoing him, and in that second, I had sentenced him to die. If only I hadn’t distracted him. If only. Maybe I wouldn’t be this way. Maybe things would’ve turned out differently. If only. When I told my psychiatrist, she responded the same way my emotionless father had, “That’s nature.” I wanted to flip her desk in front of me, destroy everything in my sight including her ostentatious framed degrees, and turn around and shrug, “That’s nature.” She would also be moving soon, and I’d have a different psychiatrist, and I really wanted to say, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” but I just stared blankly at her as I always did.

I feel very dark here in this moment—the lack of support for Kanye, the anniversary of Amy Winehouse and Robin Williams’ death. No one gives two shits until you’re dead really, but boy, will they give lip service to mental health when it’s convenient and trending. When your illness causes you to trip, and it’s ugly and you’re grasping at air and screaming and haven’t showered in days, they will be nowhere to be found. It is then that they look at you with disdain—when you are ugly crying on the floor and you tell them, “I tried to warn you.” Then, you are the pathetic kind of crazy. The kind of crazy of Kanye when Christians keep hearkening back to “He said he was God.” What is it you think mania is? Hallucinations! Grandeur! Religious delusions! Open a fucking book!

But enough about that, right? Instead, you are proud of your efforts of making Blueberry Lavender Kombucha. You go around puffing proclamations like a dragon, lavender breathed truths or ramblings. Does anyone really care? You channel the deepest ennui, the lot of you lazing on the bed. You are in one space and at arm’s length is your curled up pug. Next to her, bundled like a shrimp on the bed is your Russian Blue senior cat named Nickel, and finally, on your other side is a chewed up squeaker chicken toy with a long neck your mother bought your pug. The fan is spinning in the God awful humidity of the south, and you all have brought forth a boredom so thick that you all just stare at the popcorn ceiling and you eat an entire bag of Lindt Lindor Stracciatella truffles, one right after another in a row until they’re gone. You think you most relish the texture. You all relish the Miles Davis’ “Prayer” from Porgy & Bess. Well, you think they do judging from their animal facial expressions you’re familiar with.