Something moved between us. It was okay. It was okay because it had to be, because in that twilight moment, the world telescoped. I needed to reach towards something I couldn’t quite grasp. Relating is beautiful and strange. Communion is a rare reciprocality. She knows the strangeness of illness, the flat planes of mundanity. She has always been inside.

Care came as a cat again – in the beginning lighthearted and sincere. I felt more sure of this connection and love than at any other time in my life. The bed became a sanctuary. A church. A something. Light was shining through. Darkness was arising. The feeling of good health is emerging. I should feel terror but don’t. Most disarming over Christmas, when stakes are high.

Sometimes you read a story, watch a movie or walk down the street and somebody is going against the grain. They’re fucking with time. I’m trying to fuck with time. My body’s time. Alison Kafer writes about how crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds. But it also distorts interrelations, interdependence, and expectation. Crip fucking time. Time is fucking me up. Immersed in this crip time, your body, despite being the source of suffering, is your only companion – your enemy and comfort. This double bind remerges as a strange boundary between intimacy and kindness, limitation and control. It’s not even control. It’s patterns. It is never quite like that when you're sick. Assume the ambiguity. To share the unknown is the greatest solace.

The truth is I just feel terrible. Things hurt. Nerves shoot, synapses across the brain. And I don’t know when it’ll end, because the idea of an end is actually the place of mourning. An early death! Fucking hell it’s hard to think. Back to Christmas. I am told that the cat is clinically “overweight”, has bunions on her tail, and first-stage cancer. She takes little pills, pink ones, to get through the day. We both do, mine are blue though. The bunions repulse me, but I feel them, up and down with my hands. Bumps like anal beads. Her belly drags along the floor, a strange mop. Big flop. It’s all confused. She groans. We are both in a limbo state. An elsewhere state. Something else states. We are morphing and contouring in the bed the boundary between self/other becomes somewhat blurry. The cat conducts the bed; she orchestrates.

Sometimes I feel I could die without the cat. Persist, persist. That death would take a small bite. She understands my body as a strange system of unpredictability. Her name has changed multiple times, and she even went through a period of just being called the cat. I would lay with her, next to her, synergies colliding. In her body I saw my own, failing, in pain, unable to function, a disappointment. And embarrassment, a source of constant confusion.

The morning is clear, still. This is our lived reality, the fantasy of the other. Something like feline fury and fever dreams of forever. We are empathising. I felt very loving. I felt good. Felt the weight of it all and sat amongst it, leaned into it. Fluctuated between thought and feeling.

Desert air and hues of pink sky, grazing this limbo state. Clouds don’t form because there are none; the desire for resolution smoulders into a hazy entrapment. We are here. The desire to give myself a shape, a parameter, persists. Yet I am undone and remade. The cat is now dying. She is dead. Limber.
This grave body has ignited life. It’s all ours.