Devastation

That email.

I couldn't compute. I had called the day after I dropped off Nutkin and the charity told me they were on the way to collect him. They must have taken him back to the vet. That wobbliness. The poor co-ordination.

Oh no. It's too horrible. He would have died anyway. He couldn't have lived. Isn't this just all about me?

Probably.

How deeply he slept in my lap. How he curled up with his tail around him. How soft his fur and how perfectly white his little belly.

I stood in the rain after the email and Bobbit performed a subsong.

I thought of the story of the robin and the prince*. How the prince wanted a red rose for the princess but there were no red roses. The robin loved the prince... or maybe he was just a man... and pierced his heart on the thorn of the rose to turn the bloom red with his blood.

Man and princess lived happily ever after (or maybe divorced) and the robin died.

I put the bloom in my mead.

And I remembered that at the old church, there were red rose petals everywhere after some form of ceremony.

Everything hurts.

Poor little Nutkin. My one-hour baby.

I write this, still awake far too late as the bad cat has been stalking round screaming and refusing to eat. I write this bone tired. I write this needing to get up early tomorrow. I write this furious.

Frustrated.

I want all this to stop. I want to feel there's some point. I want to stop shouting into the wind.

I want to stop piercing my heart on the thorns of reality and watching the red blood seep away.

*To add insult to injury, it turns out that I got the rose story wrong. I was thinking of Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose". A nightingale pierces her heart for the same reason (believing that human love is more important than life). In the story the lover is a poor student and in the end it's all for naught as someone else gives the princess jewels and she likes them better. The rose is thrown in the gutter and a cart crushes it. The student rejects love and becomes a philosopher. As for the robin, his red breast comes when he feels compassion for the crucified Christ and a drop of Jesus's blood dyes his feathers.