mail.

My life is packed to bursting with tiny, inexplicable joys, floating up and bursting like soap bubbles, sparkling seconds of sudden clarity, the bright revelation that sorrow and suffering are not the core around which the Earth is built, but rather the by-products of its revolutions, energetic waste products that we must dispose of by processing them appropriately, not by wallowing in them and proclaiming them to be only sustenance upon which we live.

It is the size of these joys - molecular - as compared to the size of the sorrows - ponderous, lumbering behemoths - that skews perspective. A headcount reveals that the joys outnumber the sorrows a thousand to one, but that's no help when your electron microscope isn't handy and all you can see in front of you is the weary black hulk of a broken heart, matted, shaggy coat soaking up all that soap-bubble light until you can't even remember what it was to be clean.

My father wrote me a letter. It's not that we're not close, because we are, but it's more the occasional-text close rather than the extended-correspondence close, ya dig? And yes, texts count, for me, as being close, because it takes EFFORT to write one of those darn things, really wears on the thumbs, I find. Everyone in my generation, take note: the arthritis will strike you texting-fingers-foremost. You heard it here first.

In the middle of a letter of profound emotional intensity, heavy with love and care for his only daughter, dysfunctional though she may be, my father writes:

While the circumstances of our difficult times are uniquely our own, and our respective responses are determined by countless variables, we share many common elements. Not the least of those is jeans... at least that's what everyone says. I don't know why our mutual preference for blue, slim-fit, pre-washed should make a difference, but it does, I guess.

Read these sentences a couple of times, oh you who are probably a regular taker-in of this very blog, and you may recognize them as exactly the sort of thing, potentially word-for-word, that I might write, given the proper circumstance.

We love the way we have learned to. My mother taught me the value of emotion for its own sake - the headiness of being able to give another person your whole heart and revel in the giving, the challenge of simultaneously loving oneself and loving the rest of the world, the need to value everything, regardless of its difficulty or horror. I struggle still to internalize my mother's lessons. My brother does a far better job, which is, I suppose, why he and I are so closely bonded - I see in him the kind of love I hope someday to be able to give.

My father, on the other hand, taught me the words for love. The words are long, polysyllabic, colored with metaphor and analogy. Occasionally they're run-on sentences, though always properly punctuated. They are typed on a word processor and signed in a near-illegible slanted script. They are what comes out of your mouth when you allow yourself to take someone's hand, look them in the eye, and tell them how you feel. They fluctuate wildly between soaring proclamations of unconditional care and multilayered puns just to take the edge off. Why would you put this kind of effort into talking if you didn't feel like your conversational partner was worth every phoneme?

When you're talking love, words hurt to say sometimes, an utterly physical pain, a stab in the throat and gut, a full-body cramp. Letting them out can be like draining an abscess, pouring them forth until there's nothing left, and then sometimes the person to whom you spoke simply stares blankly, they were expecting something else, a hug? a kiss? a what? something that means more than words, you think, but there is no such thing. Not everyone speaks the language of words when it comes to love. This was a shocking realization for me, and one I am not sure I'll ever be able to come to terms with in its entirety. I can strive, though, and I will, because what is life without effort, what is speech without struggling to find the words?



Words are what I use because they are the truest thing I know - words, always words, nothing but words, I am so full of words I could give them to you forever and still have more for you, only for you, there are words I have never said that I am saving specifically to say to you. 

goodbye.

A little dog died yesterday.

He was a Pug, a classic, classy specimen of his breed; deep, perpetually worried face folds, a tight ice-cream-cone curl of a tail, ears like crushed velvet. He came in first on Saturday, vomiting, inappetent, and again yesterday morning, worse now, lethargic, painful, snapping when his belly was touched. Friday night, he had eaten part of a towel. Inconclusive x-rays notwithstanding, it was time to proceed to surgery.

I held his guts while the doctor sliced so carefully into them, extricating the foul-smelling chunk of "linear foreign body" that filled him from small intestine to colon. I kept an eye on his heart rate and respiration; I was pleased to see it remain so steady, bracycephalic (literally, "short-headed," used in medical terminology to denote flat-faced breeds such as Pugs, Bulldogs, Mastiffs, and the like) dogs being the anesthetic risks that they are. When surgery was done, I helped clean him up, put him away in a kennel, still intubated, snuggled in blankets and hot-water bottles, another assistant assigned to monitor him while I attended to the tidying of the surgical suite.

When the commotion started, it took me a second to notice. The assistant monitoring the Pug noticed that his breathing was shallow; she called over a doctor, and the doctor couldn't find a heartbeat.

Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of Atropine, Dopram, Epinephrine, chest compressions. Fifteen minutes hooked to pure oxygen, yet another assistant manipulating the bag, breathing for the patient who could not. Fifteen minutes of doctors cursing, assistants tight-lipped and silent, the hospital holding its breath in sympathy. Fifteen minutes of watching him go grayer, watching his flanks refuse to rise, his eyes and tongue dry slowly under the surgical lights.

He died there, under our hands, for no reason at all, a little dog who was sick, who went to sleep and never woke up.

The doctor made the call to the owner. We swaddled the little dog in blankets, placed him tenderly into a kennel, prepared him for a viewing, should the owner desire. A junior assistant wept quietly to herself while washing surgical tools. The rest of us knew better - these things happen, we said, especially to bracycephalic breeds, especially during traumatic surgery, arrhythmia, drug reactions, he was septic, a hundred reasons why the dog who should have survived, did not, a hundred justifications, a hundred reasons to go about your day, a hundred reasons not to cry.

When I left the hospital, he was still there, swaddled, silent, cold. Later that night, I crept into bed, buried my face, and wailed into the pillow, enraged, confused, shocked, appalled by nature and reality and the horror of my profession, the vile sucker punches that Fate sometimes delivers us when we're only in the ring fighting to save a life.

I went into work this morning as usual. I worked the day without a hitch. I remember an angry tabby cat; a Labrador who leaked urine post-surgically and whose bladder I had to express manually in his kennel while he gazed at me apologetically with morphine-dull brown eyes; a Shepherd cross who cried and cried after her biopsy, quieting only when I held her head and soothed her as her additional sedative took effect, sending her into restless, but blissfully painless, half-sleep.

When I got home from work this evening, I took a bath, sat down at my desk, did some web development, and then cried, and cried, and cried, for a little dog who should still be alive, whose tail was like a Dairy Queen soft-serve ice-cream, whose ears were soft like velvet, whose name I can't even state here due to client confidentiality, but whose name I will always remember, because he was the first dog whose surgery I assisted with who subsequently died without any reason to die, and because he, as all dogs are, was beautiful, and deserved to live forever, and because I love him.

R, wherever you are - Dog Heaven, a new dog body, another place - I hope you are loving it. I hope you can breathe freely, as you never could when you were a Pug, handsome though you were. I want you to know how fiercely you were loved in your last days. I hope you had a wonderful life last time around, and will have an even better one this time, if you are indeed going for another round. I barely knew you, but I adored you. I can only imagine how beloved you were by your family and friends.

R, you were a good dog. We miss you. We won't forget you.

childhood.

People who walk into my kitchen sometimes get confused and think I have a child.

I'm an insatiable refrigerator-art connoisseur. Anything of interest gets pinned up there, with magnets or, once I've run out of those, Scotch tape, taking its place in the prestigious art gallery of Stuff I Like to Look At When I'm Making Toast.

Currently holding pride of place are two mixed-medium pieces, combining crayon with colored pencil, depicting the following:

1. A group of Chinese giant salamanders, rendered in fetching purple, wearing party hats, sharing space with a collective of bees, also hat-bearing, entitled "Happy Birthday Emmy,"

2. The adorably tragic face of a pug, entitled "Pug."

These artworks were gifted to me by my friend Fern, who is nine. I am consistently astounded that a nine-year-old, who's got important stuff to do, including but not limited to Minecraft modding and inventing a dragon language, takes time out of her busy schedule to create original works for little old me.

When people draw attention to them, I assert their origin with the sort of submissive dignity that I feel is situationally appropriate, but the joke's on them if they think that attitude extends any deeper than theatricality. Secretly, I value these drawings more than I value my laptop, my TV, my $200 20-eye Doc Martens that I've had since I was gender-queer, and any of my jewelry except, coincidentally, the necklace Fern made for me in craft class, which has bee beads and a speech-bubble pendant that says "OMG."

Getting caught up in adulthood is all too easy. It is important to have friends who bring one back down to earth, and encourage one to notice bees, party hats, Chinese giant salamanders, the captivating colorburst of crayon and colored pencil made one.