Posted on Wednesday, 10/09/24.

Today my last childhood pet was put down. Actually as I’m writing this it’s happening. A small orange cat. My mother texted me a couple hours ago saying that she had booked an appointment because its breathing had suddenly worsened, that the usual treatments weren’t helping, something about seeing fear in the cat’s eyes, or pain. There are many reasons it is allowed but it is strange that we can schedule the death of our pets. That these appointments can be made with short notice. I chose the cat from among many when it was six months old—some adoption drive at a pet store in the bay—against the advice of my mom and siblings, as the cat was skittish and small. For years it wouldn’t socialize with us at all, preferring to hide under beds and in closets. The cat was so young then that its stomach was hairless where they had shaved it and left a fresh fixing scar. The small round sherpa-lined bed the cat came with is still the bed it sleeps on in my mother’s condominium. In later years it came out and sat with us plainly, as if having forgiven some long grievance, or realizing that all of that shyness had had no point, not up against those more horrible things bred by isolation.

For the week I’m in Germany at a mathematical institute in the middle of the Black Forest and all I can think about is death. It trickles to here from far away, from many directions, all at once. The institute is full of dark green carpet and curved chairs covered in black leather or red velveteen. The library is one of the largest mathematical collections in the world and I sit in it in the mornings sometimes while the sun comes up and reveals dense clouds among the sheer mountain faces. I eat nice things and talk with harmonic analysts. I wash the airplane trip off me. I lie in an overlarge soft bed to miss a couple lectures when the day gets long and I start to hurt. I think of the painting I liked as a high schooler called Die Toteninsel, unable to know its kitsch, to know how many had owned it and its variants and its copies. I expect to see it hanging around a corner.

It is hard to treat myself as a real person here. Most of the people I don’t know and those I do are only acquaintances, too easily treated as adversaries or symbols against which to pretend. I am leaving too soon for it to be anything different, barring calamity that it makes no sense to encourage. I send off basic texts to people I know, or say that I know, though none of them I’ve lived near for years, and the messages are substanceless, almost transparent. Photos of where I am. Words in order. I think it might comfort them, though: that I am something consistent, like a plank of wood against which a marble can be thrown producing a cheap, simple sound. I try to remember I am a real person.

I guess I have chosen the wrong time to move somewhere new—a mistake I commit every four to five years. I think I do actually want to know people consistently and for a long time—that I prefer this to most things, and that either because of some inflexibility or inneptitude or atavism toward stability in the face of fear I do not discuss this as desparately as I feel it. That I wish I could live with someone. That my world is small and getting so much smaller. I don’t know whether I am accomodating or washy. Whether I offer flexibility or a lack of commitment. How can I be both endlessly referenced and compared and yet never called on or interrogated? I realize that how I think and how I appear to act may exhibit great gaps, but also have to imagine this is true of others also, and why should I not make allowances for that sort of difference? I wonder, like I wonder about the logistics of pet euthanasia (i.e., only lightly, when sad, and with perversity), how it is that I speak easily to people with whom I’ve had horrible fights years in the past. I am the person who said and was told horrible things, and yet I am here and whatever happened then could not have been as horrible as I tell myself it was, surely—where are the wounds? where is the grave? I imagine there is some possibility that I am so lonely that I cannot survive people leaving one by one, retreating into text messages and plaintext, and so accomodate even dregs—I imagine this possibility, but it seems too self-pitying, too ungenerous to the conflicted needs of others. Do they know I would give everything? Do they know I act against my better judgement in times of crisis? My basic mood is, eventually, always equanimity. Catatonia. I am in a room in a dark forest in Germany and I am surrounded by the soft hum of death. Left in silence, and among trees, I have to imagine she is not so scary. I miss my cat; I hate that I want to visit her one last time, as if I were the one needing comfort.