Grief hides in other grief and sometimes it’ll make you wish stupid things like that your cat dies soon so that he might have a reason to reach out to you and you get one last brush of his attention

If my cat dies something grim will breathe into me, a belief that my youth is dead because I equate my cat with the birth of my childhood since I picked him out at three years old and he’s grown up with me ever since.

He’s aged mental miles faster than me and his hair is matted so compactedly that when you pet his corroding spine you touch what feels like two additional spines on either side of the natural one.

His hair around the pseudo skeleton sticks straight up like he’s a stone carved Halloween decoration and he whines aimlessly throughout the night.

Suffice to say that this shallow wish might be better for him than it would be for me.

The grief that’s hiding is the death of me through the death of my cat and the grief that is dripping down my face is what feels like the death of me but what is really not a death at all and in fact a birth.

So if I get my wish, my cat will die, and I with him, and I also get my brush and as a result miss my birth and receive even more of my death.

I mourn the incoming demise of my cat within the already occurring demise of something else because if I blend them together then the net death is lower than it would’ve been and I will have minimized my own grief except the way it will actually go is that I will have maximized my own grief because in all these scenarios I end up dying a lot and even worse it will have been through a desperate attempt to stay alive when in reality I wasn’t yet dead.

My cat has to stay alive and what’s dead has to stay dead for me to stay alive. Or my cat can die but it has to have nothing to do with what I need from my ex boyfriend.

I’ve figured out that no matter how many times I boil and simmer and boil again it always cooks down to the same sentiment that it’s life and shit happens, and so does death. And I have to cook it down to this because although I haven’t grown out of wishing on shallow fixes for teary eyes, I have grown out of the catastrophizing of said grief. And these can exist at the same time, there can be tears without death but not usually death without tears. It’s a catch-22 but where more importantly I am the one who’s 22 and I’m trying really hard not to catch anything and rather to let go of it all.