severing

Our cat brought in a mouse today. I knew as soon as I heard her huntress meow, but I forgot until I plucked a sheet from the top of a laundry pile, and there it was: onyx-eyed, shell-eared, running for new cover. Except, not running, exactly. Pulling itself along on its front legs only, dragging its pink hind feet behind, the way our baby used to do before he learned to crawl. Except then he learned to crawl, and to walk, and he's nearly running now, whereas the mouse probably took a fang to the spinal cord and was on its way out. 

I say "it" for clarity. I don't know the mouse's gender, and "they" seems precious in this context, or confusing. I'm thinking of all the things I do for my own comfort and clarity. 

I caught the mouse twice; I have a system now, thanks to our cat's prolific haul. I thwap a tupperware container over the creature, then slide a magazine underneath. Sometimes it's The New Yorker. Sometimes it's the nonprofit punk zine I used to write for. They still send me free issues, and I always feel a pang of punk guilt. I tape the container to the magazine with blue painter's tape, and walk with the mouse or lizard or very occasionally bird to the wildest part of the median, the strip across from the overgrown yard with Fuck the Cops scrawled on a piece of wood leaning against the fence.

If I were braver, I think, I would kill the mouse myself. Or I would make it a mouse wheelchair out of a matchbook. I tell myself all the time that a diminished life does not have to be a bad life. It's the season for thinking about such things. For Russian nesting doll ruminations, for planning a Good Death on one wall of my brain and a Christmas list on the other. 

What if it was me, dragging where I once ran? I wouldn't want to be thrown to the coyotes. And yet: what utility, to know your life fed someone else's. 

*

I want consciousness to last forever. I want to sit on a cloud eating Oreos and watch my loved ones discover and rediscover the world one crunchy fall leaf at a time, and, too, I want to down a bottle of whiskey and pause this consciousness business right now. It's the worst idea, really—the idea of ideas, the knowing and the awareness of the end of knowing.

The ego would try to keep itself going forever. That's so ego of it. What lasts forever? Only the collective everything, and cancer. Ask Henrietta Lacks' diaspora of cells. Glass tubes that hold our shared shame.

*

Part of the Palestinian girl's face is obscured by a white bandage, but the untethered thing inside her refuses to be unheard. She screams about her martyred family: her nephew, her brother who just married. She is thirteen, but when you search "thirteen-year-old Palestinian girl yelling at world" so many videos fill the screen. So many girls. One wanted to be a singer. One describes watching her mother die. One had a cat who is still looking for her on the rooftop.

And so you can return to the scene of the crime only in your mind, the only place you ever are anyway.

Someone behind the camera asks her for her name. She gives it calmly, the way she might have ordered a soda or answered an attendance call in class. She can be calm, but she shouldn't be. 

*

Happy people are like stopped clocks, correct twice a day.

The people who love me tell me how to quiet the screaming in my mind, but wouldn't that be convenient for everyone? I can give my name too. I can check into doctor's appointments and show up on time and go quietly into good nights and bad. I probably will, eventually. 

I'm the type to roll over, show my belly, apologize.

I used to think that if we all wanted God to exist, that was enough to create God; did it matter which came first, the wishing or the deity, the Us or the Him? (Her, Them, It; there is no convenience or clarity) Now I think about how my thinking has failed me, and I don't know if I want wishes to be horses after all. I don't know what I want—or rather, I do, but I don't trust it—and wanting seems so feeble.

The only real thing, it seems, it to stitch oneself hard to the ancestors and the descendants, feel the needle pierce my skin. Not a denial of the self, but a diaspora. Molly called it the Great Oneness, but she's not around to ask anymore.