I'm Full

This morning I left the house in a decent mood. As I rounded the corner, I saw Little One, one of the neighborhood strays, and watched as he came towards me, then veered away at the last second. I smiled and walked on toward my bus stop.



Standing and waiting a few minutes later, I saw Little One again, this time crossing Jackson. I silently urged him on, holding my breath as he dodged away from a car, since he was taking his own sweet time and Jackson is a busy street, even at that time. He disappeared into the bushes along the schoolyard, no doubt looking for something tasty.



And then, about five minutes later, he came back out, and stepped back into Jackson.



Out of nowhere came the speeding car, and I thought no, he'll swerve--but he didn't. I heard the wheels thump as they hit Little One.



I ran into the street, praying for some small miracle--just a broken leg, perhaps--but there weren't going to be any miracles this morning. He was trying to pull himself up on his front paws, his hindquarters unmoving. After one weak attempt, he lay down on the pavement, twitched a couple of times, and then stopped moving.



I was standing in the middle of Jackson with traffic coming towards me, and thinking I should pick him up...maybe the emergency vet...maybe I can... I didn't want to move him, in case there was some tiny spark of life left in him, because even if there was, it was so clear that this poor little kitty wasn't going to make it and anything I did was going to prolong his agony, if there was any left to prolong--I didn't want to move him over to the side of the street because...well, if he WAS still even a little bit alive, it would end more quickly for him where he was. On the side of the road he could have lingered for another ten or fifteen painful minutes; where he was, his pain wouldn't last more than another few seconds. I think I was a little bit afraid that he WASN'T dead, and not quite sure enough that he was. And even if he was, even if I could have given him a little more dignity in death, I was standing in oncoming traffic and there wasn't any time...



So I told him I was sorry, and then I walked away, to the next bus stop, with my hands over my ears because I didn't want to hear what there might have been to hear.



That's right: I'm a coward. I know this. I have always had a fear of creatures sick or broken or dead; and I don't always think clearly in a crisis. I'm not proud of what I did today--even if it might have been the merciful thing to do, in some brutal way.



A few minutes later, I got on the bus and started thinking about it.



I'm sure it would be a source of amusement, to most people in my neighborhood, seeing me all shook up over the death of a little cat. That neighborhood just teems with human pain; if I knocked on any door, I'm sure I could hear about their own tragedies: a brother or nephew shot on the street, a father jailed or a grandfather lynched, a sister killed by her boyfriend, a daughter who overdosed. And in the face of that, the death of a little cat is a small, small thing--but every life is huge, to the one who's living it.



I did okay, though, til I got on the train. I had planned to sleep on the train, as usual; I stayed up way too late last night, and I really needed the extra hour. And so I put in my earplugs and closed my eyes, and I just couldn't get past that memory, past wondering if there was something more I could have done.



I tried to do what I always do when something is too huge for me to deal with--swallow it down and promise myself I'd deal with it later. It seems I'm always somewhere inappropriate and public when it comes time to experience big painful thoughts; always on a train, always at work, always with somewhere to be or something to do that makes it impractical to feel or react. And so I tried to take this new sadness and put it in the pile with the rest, the great To-Do box of emotion that never seems to empty.



But it wouldn't go. It wouldn't fit, and what's worse, it made me realize how tired I am of even HAVING these things, of keeping all these things inside. I have no more room inside me, not even for the small things. The big things take up too much space. The huge mountain that is my memory of JP. My job. The things I know and haven't been admitting to myself about this whole thing with LJ. All the past ten years of false starts, next-big-things, and maybe-this-time's. All that big pile that I've been carrying, ignited by the death of one little white-and-black cat.



I sat on the Purple Line and just bawled.



I can't do this too much longer, I don't think.