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2006-01-17 // 11:31 a.m. Hi Etai, Well, it seems Holly has finally gotten around to responding to the e-mail I sent her a few days before Christmas. If in fact my e-mail asked a question, I do believe Holly has given her answer, loud and clear. Here is the e-mail, along with the attached poem that she chose to include: Dear Kyle, Yes, grace is always working all around us, isn't it? Thank you for sharing your doctor story. I wish I could have sent you the total money I owe you, and I am glad that what I sent moved things forward in some small way for you. I attach a poem I came across and liked--perhaps you already know it. Blessings, Holly the poem (which I'm sure you've seen...most people are familiar with it):
After a While
After a while you learn I'm choosing to "get the hint," so to speak, even though her e-mail was far more obvious than a hint - she blatantly, albeit artfully, let me know that she has checked me off as a person from her past and that I should do the same. I can't say I'm surprised. I can't even say that I'm disappointed. I don't think, in writing to her Christmas week, that I wanted to rekindle our connection. Let sleeping dogs lie, I suppose, especially since Jenna seems to hate her with the passion of the firey pits of hell. But I suppose I was asking a question, in a way. I don't know what the question was, but I know with certainty that Holly's response answered that question. No, I do not feel surprised or disappointed. Just sad, as usual, but a different kind of sad. Sad in the more general term. I no longer feel sad about "losing" Holly; I feel sad that friendships end. The kind of friendships that reach you deeply, the kind that remind you just how many layers of vulnerability stand guard over your heart. And that is a familiar sad, it is one I've come to know quite well over the years. It is fear-making sadness and, to be honest, I'm a bit disappointed in myself for playing into that dynamic and writing her that e-mail. But what's done is done. I won't contact her again. On a different note, things continue to grow more tense around here. I am still unemployed. This seems to have become the story of my life this past year. It's coming on the one-year anniversary since I left the newspaper and, weirdly, everyone around me seems to be suggesting that I attempt to get rehired there. Both my parents and Jenna's parents have stated that it would be an easy fix to my current problem: I have no car on the road, I have no health insurance, and I need a job. Despite my initial nausea toward the idea, I did give it some honest thought, mainly because the job offers a company vehicle after 3 months of employment. But it is just not a possibility. First of all, I believe whole-heartedly that they would not rehire me for more than one reason. Secondly, the reasons I left that job still hold. Hell, leaving that job was the catalyst for this past year of my pathetic work situation. In a sense, that could mean I never should have left. But in another sense (the one I'm choosing to go with), it means that I would be repeating a mistake by working there again, even if they would rehire me. Maybe you recall the conversations I had with both you and Holly about wanting to work there for a year before I quit. Well, I did it. I worked there for one year, not a second more. For a change, I fulfilled a goal that I had set for myself. I see no need to go through the negativity it would take to put myself back under their claws. It is the only place I'm refusing, though. At this point, I would work anywhere else within driving distance because I am getting desperate. Jenna's depression and resentment mount. I have an education loan that is going to default tomorrow and another one that is going to default next week. Jenna does not have the $130 it would take to keep it from defaulting and my parents have told me that I better just find a way to pay it. My parents don't even know I'm unemployed; I am living a lie with them daily. All this and yet I still feel the paralysis. I go out and apply for jobs but not because I care to improve my life. I'm too numb to care. I do it because I know Jenna will move out of our apartment if I don't. She won't leave me in terms of us being a couple, but she will move back into her parents' and leave me to support myself in an apartment I have no money to pay for. She will do this not because she doesn't care, but because I have unjustly put her through financial hell for the majority of our relationship and this is the last straw for her. Last week, we took a drive one night. It was one of those nights when you wish you could just drive straight in one direction until you run out of gas and then start your life over in whatever town your car stops in. Of course, we had no money to restart our lives somewhere else (not to mention we already tried that in Massachussettes and failed miserably), so we decided to just drive west until we were in another state, possibly sleep in the car overnight and return home when we felt like it. I wanted to call you once we had crossed the NY state border. I wanted to tell you that, despite all the distance between us, I was in that moment at least one state closer :o) But we got distracted. Not long after crossing the state line, something happened that I had never experienced before. In the dark, on a busy road where cars were going far faster than they should have been, I ran over a cat. I was not going that fast but hitting him was unavoidable. Of course, Jenna immediately fell into wailing sobs of dispair and, for all intents and purposes, left the earth and any ability to interact with it. This left me completely alone in the situation, knowing the cat must be dead but trying to decide whether to turn around and find it, knock on some doors to see if somoene owned it, etc. After pulling over to get myself together (Jenna screaming the entire time), I turned around, parked the car in a small parking lot, and got out to start searching. Something must have clicked in Jenna because she became silent the moment I opened my car door, and she got out to look with me. Etai, that cat was nowhere. It disappeared. There was no body in the road or in the small ditch that ran along the road. We searched the yards of the few lone houses in the area. We eventually found ourselves on an old, rusty business property. Walking among small, dilapidated buildings, we started noticing cats in every corner. None of them would come near us, and none of them looked like the one we'd hit (it was black and white). Then, we noticed a small, grey cat about 20 feet away from us. She was meowing loudly, as though to get our attention. All the other cats had disappeared in shadows. I walked in her line of sight, but not directly toward her because I didn't want to scare her. As I got closer, she ran right up to me, and plopped herself down on her back so I could rub her belly. This, I thought, was incredibly odd behavior for a cat, any cat, but especially one that had never seen me before, and who apparently lived outside. After I pet her for a minute, I dared to pick her up and she let me with no problem. It was then that I noticed she was badly wounded. She was not the cat we had hit; she looked nothing the same. Besides this, her wound was not from being hit; it looked like a bad fight or an infection. An egg-sized hole was in her fur near her shoulder, and the wound looked like a combination of a gash and a puncture. It looked no more than a day or two old. We had no way of paying for her to go to a vet, so we decided to find a place that would help her if we surrendered her to them. (Apparently, according to Jenna, if we wanted to keep her, we'd have to pay but, if we were willing to just drop her off and surrender her to their care, some vets would help her and then she could go to a shelter where she would hopefully be adopted). We found a McDonald's up the street where there was an employee who was kind enough to bring a phone book out to our car so that we didn't risk opening the car door (the cat was trying to get out now because she was scared). Well, after about two hours of making phone calls and having animal hospital after animal hospital tell us that either a) she was our financial responsibility because we'd picked her up or b) we should put her back where we found her (and these people call themselves veterinarians?), we finally gave up on NY state and the SPCA in general. (The MSPCA in Massachusettes told us sure, they'd take her, if only she'd been found in Mass., because it was "illegal to take an animal over state lines.") So, we drove back to CT, thinking we'd call some animal hospitals there and just tell them we'd found her in CT so the state line issue didn't come up. Well, believe it or not, when vet's office after vet's office wanted nothing to do with her or us, we finally flagged down a state trouper! The reason we did this is because some of the vet's offices had told us that they could treat her only if she was brought in by an animal control officer. So, naturally, we tried to call animal control, but their answer was that "there was nothing they did for cats." Well you know, Etai, after nearly three hours of trying to get this cat some medical attention, the person who went the extra mile for us was that trouper. He asked us to follow him back to his headquarters, where we waited for over a half hour in the car. When he came back outside to talk to us, he told us he'd done some online research and made some phone calls, and he'd found a woman who runs an animal rescue who was willing to pay the vet bill and find the cat a home if we just dropped her off at a certain vet's office in the town where she lived. So the story has a happy ending; we thanked the cop for being so kind, commented on the drive to the vet's that he had just earned himself a whole bunch of good karma, dropped her off at the vet's, stayed to see that she was okay and would get better, signed some release papers and then drove home. I do not have a clue. I don't. Why did it take running over one cat in order to find this other cat that needed help? Why did going for a long drive in a time of deep depression lead to taking one creature's life and saving another's? What spiritual connection did these two cats have with each other, that the first would sacrifice their life in order to save the second's? Why were Jenna and I involved in this organized act of karma all the way out in NY state? Were she and I the only people who would have gone to that much trouble to make sure that cat got help? Whatever the answers, it was an incredible situation. The first cat, the second cat, the McDonald's employee, the CT state trouper, the woman who runs the animal rescue, the vet tech's at the office we finally brought the cat to, Jenna and I --- all of us brought together for this one act of kindness toward another living soul. One would think that two people - Jenna and I - who wandered into an orchestrated event such as this would walk away feeling a sense of purpose, a feeling of contentment, not only for being involved, but for being someone who would notice that they were meant to be involved. Yet, after this whole thing ended and the cat was safe, we returned to our life here in our apartment, me unemployed, Jenna stretched to the limit, and continued our everyday, seemingly pointless life. Can I say we came out of that night unchanged? No, not for sure. I'm positive, at least on an unconscious level, that the event left its mark. But my question is: how is it that we could take part in something so obvious, so purposeful and meaningful, and then just return to our depression? Life is just so strange... I should go. Once again I'm thinking "on paper" instead of looking for a job. The story continues... Please, if you find the words in your heart, say a prayer for me tonight. Love you, - Kyle -
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