acta est fabula

Prompt 1: Write about cats.

Prompt 2: Write about how being a cat is better than being a person.

Prompt 3: Write a letter.

Disclaimer: This is a 'zero' prompt so please forgive me.

The black thicket has enclosed on me again while you’ve been in Pennsylvania basking in your golden wife’s glow and playing golf with country club big shots on grass so green and shiny it may well be plastic. I guess pushing you out brought more into the cave of my garbled head, which by this wintertime’s melancholy gleam might be hanging on only by a fine thread. A paperweight’s been removed from me and I can feel the relief of your pressure no longer choking my breath and tying me down to the muddy earth. But soon I was given to the wind as a worthy sacrifice, and am now blowing about with no direction and with no façade of normality, because I can’t marry the wind and have a dozen perfect private school children as I’m sure you’re doing while I’m writing this note breezing along with me. You said your wife was from Belmont, and how funny that was because you knew I was from Belmont too, and maybe we could go and see the all the huge flocks of crows fly south like they do every year from Belmont before wintertime. Only now I’m one of them; not one of the ones in the group, but the one trailing behind, trying to catch up with the flock, but unable to because it was born wrong, its wings came just a little too short, and it’s flapping and it's flapping although it will never be enough and when it knows that it will finally give up and fall, spiraling down like a torpedo that everyone watches with dull fascination and waits for to burst.

Lately I’ve been replaying that one winter when the blizzards got especially fierce and you said hide in the bathroom, it’s the farthest away from the windows, because we didn’t have a basement at that time because you were still going through residency and the bills were too high and we ended up buying a little robin’s egg blue house on the corner of Elm Street and Sycamore. I liked that house. It was warm and safe and stretched out its womb to conform to the shape of my body, my little cranny away from the world, safe and whole. But you said don’t worry, we’ll find better. This is just a temporary solution, and you rubbed my arm with plastic empathy and pretended to comfort me as if I were bereaved. I remember escaping your grasp so I could look at our new fireplace and see if I could do something on my own for once and try to light it. You never looked so bewildered.

As the blizzards cleared and the snow began to fall again, gingerly attaching itself to our windows as though it were uncertain of acceptance, we sat at the kitchen table, as I sipped hot chocolate and you slurped down coffee. In a moment of vulnerability I told you I adored the wintertime. A mistake. Lifting your eyes from the cherry tablecloth to meet mine, you smiled a little smile and said that you loved it too. The rush of excitement I felt from this, the feeling of being understood, put a smile on my face too until much later when I realized what I had done and how I had already shared with you every last quirk I had; then my smile melted faster than the snowflakes, who compromised their being when they attached to the window and slowly began to dissolve into nonexistence, drops that ran together, indistinguishable from each other. I felt empty. Nothing was mine anymore; I had given you the spring rain, the summer nights, the autumn loneliness. I had given you Bach and Chopin, libraries and art museums, the solitude of both early morning and dwindling night. I had given you all my old jokes and my laughter and my virginity and you just took it all, everything I ever had, up on that plane that peach-colored morning when you rode above an innocent halo of sunlight, out to make a fortune and to make a family, and nothing was mine anymore.

So if I am going to go down in this ship, I at least want to do it with some semblance of a self, which for so long I have not had, because I hid all my dullness and worthlessness behind you, trying to fit your face and my own behind a single mask which I should have known would never fit. I thought you could be my key to surviving under the scrutiny of the world, that you would help me float when I could not swim but only be washed away by a current I could not follow. At church or dinner parties or even at the grocery store, I never knew, and still don’t know, what to say. I couldn't, after all, talk about the rainfall with just anyone, because the check-out woman could certainly agree with me that yes, the rain is very pretty today, and that would be the end of that, and my soul still would crave. You gave me an excuse, then, to never have to find words, because whenever we were out people would approach you instead of me. All I would have to do was smile uncomfortably while you carried on about what-the-hell-ever and charmed everyone who spoke to you, saying how funny and smart you were and regarding me like a mere ring on your finger, or even worse, a thorn in your side. You apologized every time I made some uncomfortable remark and kicked me back into the shadows where I belonged. You encouraged me to smile so that I might extend your own rays and betray the infesting plague rotting my mind, to hold in the innards spilling out of me at a faster rate than I could hold, because I’m sure it wouldn't have looked good had I broken down with you standing next to me.

Now with my costume gone the thicket is ever dark and I cannot act. Perhaps never again, I’m afraid. I've forgotten my lines. And I don’t know which character I am anymore. The thicket is closing and its dark and its dark, I can’t hide I can’t fight it cant fight, I am alone and im falling i cant fight it inadequate disgusting i cant take this anymore cant fight cant fight

i think this play is finally over

I'll see you in the wintertime.