June 17, 2000
Happy, But...
It has been a very long, but mostly very good day. I'm tired as hell, so I don't think I'll be up for much longer. I spent most of the day driving around with my mom. We were in the car pretty consistently from 10 until 4. The good news is that I have an apartment, assuming I get approved for it. The bad news is that the Humane Society didn't have Max. (I did get a call about the signs I put up though. More on that in a moment.)
I think I'll be quite happy with the apartment we found. It's right across the street from where I last lived with Hollingsworth. I'm back to my old stomping grounds, and this makes me very happy. The apartment itself is a rather small one bedroom, but it should be big enough for me and my stuff and whatever animals I have (hopefully Max!). My financial crisis is at an end, hopefully for good. This also makes me quite happy. My mom said today, "I want nothing more than to see you settled and living, not surviving from paycheck to paycheck." Amen. That's where I want to get too. Maybe this will do it. I really think it will.
The Humane Society was tough. I admit, I had my hopes up. They had several black cats, but none of them was Max. Most were too small or too gray or both. I'll keep checking back every few days. The hardest part was while we were standing in line. The lady in front of us was holding a little dog. She was holding him so tight, we thought that he'd been lost and she'd gotten him back. Then the worker came around and took the dog and gave the woman a pamphlet called "Dealing With the Loss of a Pet". She started crying, and I realized she'd brought her dog in to be put to sleep. I looked over at my mom, and she was crying too. I love my mom for stuff like that. It shows that I get my tender heart from her. It turned out that Mom got reminded of when she took my childhood cat Ki-poo (yeah, that was his name, my dad named him) in to be put to sleep. And here I'd thought she'd always hated that cat.
I spent a few minutes playing with some of the kittens in the cages. One of them started gnawing on my finger and licking at it like Max does when he plays. That was when I almost lost it. Damn, I miss my cat.
Originally, I wasn't going to write so much about Max yet again. I had a wonderful evening tonight. After I got home from apartment hunting, I hung out for a while, restless. I wanted to go do something rather than just sitting at home all night. So I took off and went to go see Titan AE. I should mention that this is the first movie I've seen in a theatre since The Blair Witch Project last summer. Titan AE was a lot of fun. The animation was fantastic, as I expected. The whole thing had a decidedly anime feel to it, but that's also about what I expected. Then after the movie I went to dinner, then came home.
I was feeling great. Seriously, I was in the best mood I'd been in for weeks. Moving back closer to the Ann Arbor area feels like moving home again. I've been a total recluse in the time I've been here. About 95% of the time, I went to work, then came home. Weekends, I stayed home. I don't think that was a bad thing. Looking back, I think I needed that time, to come to terms with a lot of changes in my life. 1999 was a tough year for me. Last summer was especially tough in a lot of ways. I had a lot of grieving to do, some over the ending of the relationship with Hollingsworth, some over other issues I've been dealing with. Shutting myself away was how I dealt with that all. Now I'm ready to come out of my cocoon. I'm starting to already, and it feels good.
That's what I meant to write about when I got home. How happy I was. How I could see things were in an upswing after a lot of darkness. Then I got home to find this message on my answering machine: "Hi, this is Sandra. I, um, saw your cat. We're on Canyon Drive. He was heading on the east side of our house. My number is [her number]. Thanks!" It was too late to call her back. But what the hell is there to say? I appreciate her calling and all, but how does that help me? Okay, she saw him wandering around. I don't know when. I don't even know if it was Max she saw. I don't know how that information is going to help me find him. All it did was make me sad.
I know I'm avoiding dealing with Max's loss. I don't know how else to cope right now. I'm hold until I decide that he really is gone for good. I don't know how to react, because he's probably still alive and he might come back. I just don't know. That's absolutely the hardest part about all of this. Not knowing. How can I grieve and cry and get all weepy about this when he might come back? I don't know how to feel, so I hide from it. Probably not wise.
Today was such a good day, too.
Posted by Lisa at June 17, 2000 10:50 PM
