2015-09-04

sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
Tonight I got to show Pimpernel Smith (1941) to [personal profile] skygiants, [personal profile] genarti, [livejournal.com profile] agoodshinkickin, and two people who should let me know their LJ/DW handles if they have them. There was an inordinate amount of kugel, both sweet and savory, and a rose-mint-marjoram-infused vodka provided by one of the people who may or may not have an online handle. It was the most social thing I've done in a very long time.

I came home and worked for several hours by the grace of [livejournal.com profile] derspatchel's laptop, which he has lent me for the purpose. Autolycus has spent nearly the entire time with me on the couch, purring and supportive, occasionally butting his head against my hands and gnawing gently on one of my wrists when I pay too much attention to my job and not enough to him. If there's not room for him to settle on my lap, as he likes best, he drapes himself over the back of the couch and watches the screen over my shoulder, purr crackling away behind me; he tries to groom whatever parts of me he can reach. He is an aggressively comforting cat. Bertie Owen has been out of commission since crashing halfway through this afternoon's backup. My dream scenario is that I'll take him to my parents' house and borrow a can of compressed air from my father and blow out a whole bunch of dust and cat hair that combined with the unrelieved summer humidity have been causing him to overheat, but I have no idea how realistic this is.

Afterward I sat in Rob's office, with Autolycus prowling around the shelves behind me—Hestia was in the kitchen, alternately napping on her favorite cardboard box or trying to catch insects through the window—and read about a dozen issues of Caitlín R. Kiernan's The Dreaming (1997–2001), which I still wish had been collected. I hadn't read most of them since grad school. My love for Lucien remains undiminished. He was my favorite character even in The Sandman, with Cain and Abel following a close second, because that's my brain. I can remember haunting the Million Year Picnic for new and then back issues of The Dreaming.

I feel very much as though most of my life has been lost.

I've realized the summer's ending; we're entering the season where I have the most trouble with ghosts, mostly of myself. I thought I was through that stage. I thought in 2013 I was alive. I am holding a soft-furred cat and hoping I still am, even if I can't believe it. I really can't.
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