Your yellow hair is kinder than your heart is

I got up very early this morning on an hour's sleep to accompany my mother to a doctor's appointment and stayed surprisingly awake until four in the afternoon, when I finished Ross Macdonald's The Way Some People Die (1951), started The Barbarous Coast (1956), passed out for another hour with Hestia curled behind my knees, and had a solid narrative block of nightmare of the kind that looks stupid when written down, but was vividly disorienting and upsetting even as I was waking from it. I was badly overheating. I lay on my back trying to feel real. Hestia was gone by then, but Autolycus leaped onto the bed and instantly molded himself to my side, purring so that I could feel it vibrating through my ribs. Earlier he had been prowling around the top of the dresser while vocally speculating about leaping onto the top of the bedroom door (I am pleased to say he did not go for it) and for some time after that I'd heard him playing with the jingly feather on a stick, but he stayed beside me, dedicatedly purring, until the dream started to drain off and I could think about getting up and making dinner. After I had made a baked potato with goat cheese and was still not feeling fantastic, he arranged himself on my lap and employed more purring along with a judicious grooming of my hands. He is a very empathetic little cat. Everything else I wanted to write about today needs more sleep first.