Someday summer

Someday summer will come, and I will be cured of the relentless urge to re-mate, because all of the world will be mating then, and I will live vicariously through her many manifestations. 

Summer will come and the days will stretch long and hot and sweet.  I will buy or grow, and then cook: summer squash with basil and peppers, corn and oregano and greens.  I will eat it all by my lonesome, or I will share it with another human, and it will be delicious.  I will smile up at the sun, sitting out on the patio of my new home in East San Jose.

Someday summer will come and hopefully I won’t be as thick as I was before, but neither will I be so thin as I am now, where everyone who sees me comments on my changed face and shape.  I am sick with grief, and it is the dead of Winter, but the dead of Winter shall also pass.

Summer will come, and the all the women I desire now will possibly pass too, and the grief at losing my life mate will pass, but more slowly, or in nuances, somehow.  There is one woman in particular I like today, or rather am compelled by, and if she could stick around, in a good way that heals both of us, I would wish for that.  But whether she does or does not, I can hope and suppose that when summer finally gets her azz over here, there will be Analuz DeLeon and funny, quirky Mikha.  Mikha and I, in the summer or even in the dead of a dying Winter, can make fart jokes and laugh hysterically.  By this summer she will be six, and I will be forty.  I think that’s a good ratio.  And hopefully she will have not correctly learned how to pronounce my familial title, and will still scream “Marrina!” and greet me with a flying tackle. 

There will be (hope of hopes) beautiful centered Jen Johnson and brilliant Ben and adorable Becca, with Scott rumbling in the background.  Friend of my heart and unofficial, amazing, godkids.  There will (my G-ddess willing) be sweet, sweet Josie, the mothership, now with Tadeo and Joaquin too, and perhaps by the time summer has come around, I will be out of this crazy funky freaky space enough to have spent some serious chunks of time with them, and to know them, and for them to know my silly Tia face, if not by heart, then at least quite, quite well. 

And in the summer I think I will still have a lovely family and nieces, and call my Mom often, and pet the fat, purring, hopefully-reasonably-healthy Leopard until she drools.  And the body of sweet Georgia Brown will either have been brought to my new home, or left in this old garden of fatal grief, and either way it will be OK.  This summer, I hope that I will still work with that fierce tender red fox Stasia McGehee, and the days will pass far more quickly than they do now, in a haze of weeding and sweeping, and laughter – not like they used to, exactly, but not like they drag this Winter, either.  And we will be dancing-working-everything friends, like we were, and are, but with more happiness involved. 

And my beloved Perfessor Cindy will possibly still love me via Facebook and perhaps we’ll have gone for another intensely connective outing.  Who knows.

I can hope that by summer, I will be this strong, but much healthier, and this smart, but much happier, and that I will have taken even some teeny tiny slice of this crazy, debilitating, drooling grief, and turned it to my advantage.  Maybe I will be in a choir, or a band, a relationship, or a new school program for a brand-new degree in fabulousness.  Maybe I will just work and read and drink wine like I do now.  But I would like to be able to mention home, future, or partnership without the tears sneaking in and shredding me.

Hopefully I will have learned something, grown somewhat; I could imagine a day of basil stir fry and laughter when I look back on this pulverized, powerless winter and it feels far, far away.

And some day, in the heat of summer or thereafter, I may take walk with the woman who once was my mate, my wife without need of vows, my partner in love and in home, and ask her what happened, and how she left, and why.  And she may not be able to explain, because some things are beyond the explanation.  And I will accept that, since the lack of acceptance, is, perhaps, a small part of what caused the need for explanations in the first place.

Today of Christmas 2012 feels endless, obsessive; sick, and bad and doomed.  But whatever else I may or may not be, I am indeed an ecologist, and I know that someday, someday, SOME DAY, the summer will also come. 

Animal survival

I am operating on the animal plane, a female coyote, instinctive.

My life mate has gone, is gone, is sick, will not come home.  She broke the den, she left the nest, she hurts but will not return.  I dream of death at night, and my sleep is shattered.

I move my bed for the safety of the heart.  Sleep outside on the patio until the rains come, and then downstairs on the living room floor, pillowed with blankets, awkward.  Upstairs, the expensive queen sized nest sits, betrayed, scentless.

It is freezing cold but I feel it little.

I have lost the joy of eating and my breasts are small and my pants hang.  I am driven to re-mate and I circle relentlessly, sniffing, looking.  I am driven to find a new den, and I push and push and scout until I finally buy a new home to hole up in.  I wait for the current owners to leave, tail curled around my paws, panting.

My new Winter mate is tall, and smells like my tribe from her mouth to her cunt.  At first she moves recklessly, relentlessly lovely in my broken nest, making coffee and lighting a fire in my fireplace, laughing a deep gravelly laugh.  I am drawn towards wholeness, and towards her.  But in a month, she says to stop taking her t-shirts to sleep in, that she does not want to be claimed by me, and I am broken down, again.  She dons lilac-scented lotion and refuses my kisses, and I am furious, and confused.

My pack worries.  They whine and lick my face, bring me choice tidbits.  A prominent member, sick with grief?  No, no good, this is not good.  They circle on sweet paws, hemming me in, endless, comfort, community.

But thin and lean, it’s good to be this lean – I am light on the hunt for yet another mate and my muscles for moving my belongings stand out against my ribs.  Wintertime coyote trots endlessly through the frozen air.  The new den will be ready soon!

My mother has come, and I can relax.  She is small, curved and restless, a comfortable graying energetic queen dog.  We go out to eat and I eat and eat.  We come home to sleep and I sleep, through the night, into the morning, the den is being guarded, I am safe.  My new nest is finally ready so the alpha queen and I go to the paint store and discuss shades of off-white.  She and the painter laugh at my desire to have white ceiling, white baseboards and white walls, too.  The den must be clean, open, uncompromised.  It must have integrity and wholeness.

The Winter solstice is in two days and it’s cold enough to snap a finger bone.  I starve and trot and circle, I move and paint and make do.  I continue.  I carry on.  I survive with this animal instinct.