I’m adding stuff I wrote out of order. But since I feel out of order I reckon that’s okay.

It is a month now.

The ache is still there

The feeling of incipient doom and dread is still there. It feels constantly like something really terrible is about to happen. This is the feeling I had all my childhood. It was my emotional wallpaper. I was 30 before someone told me it’s name was anxiety. I assumed everyone felt like that.

But then I remember that the terrible thing DID happen. I walked Murphy into the clinic and carried him out dead and I somehow have to live with that fact, and the panic inside me rises again because I don’t know how I will do that.

All the fear of my childhood rushes back into my throat and fills up the hole that opened up in my solar plexus a month ago. It opened up at the precise moment that she handed me, not the lead of my dog dancing and excited to see me, but a dog who couldn’t stand up, who seemed not to know me, who was blue and gasping……..and as though there was no need to explain this transformation.

That hole on my middle starts inside me but it seems to extend to eternity. The winds of space seem to blow through it. But Murphy seems to have slipped beyond eternity. Beyond my reack.