This could be the saddest dusk I've ever seen

[etherati]

So, this last week was pretty godawful.

First, my parents lost another of the cats that I helped bottlefeed and hand-rear from two days old, back in 1998. Cancer, again, just like her brother. Their other brother is now the only one left. I can't say a lot about this part because I am still too devastated to process it.



Then a freak frost came through and completely destroyed my garden weeks too early. Just an annoyance, but god damn it.

Then I lost the musical bedrock of my life, which leaves me feeling strangely like... I don't know, like without a soundtrack, the rest of my life won't be as real as the first 31 years have been. There are certain things you expect will always be there, like the moon and the smell of newsprint on transit in the morning and the way the sky looks bruised and translucent after a storm, and REM was one of those things to me. They got me through more shitty things than I can count, and they told me that everything I was feeling had been felt and survived before, and they promised me that there was nothing wrong with me for being nostalgic and sentimental and for looking for all the lost and forgotten things, traced out in grainy black and white and framed by transistor radio static. It was okay to see things differently, to resonate with strangeness. Now I don't know if it still is.

Ugh. Damn it all.

I guess I just needed to get some of this laid out, here. Hopes for a better week coming up, please? :\

Comments

[lotus0kid.livejournal.com]

Aww, poor sweetheart, both you and your adorable cat. I definitely didn't raise the cats I grew up with, but it hurt like hell to lose them and there are still times when I just sit and remember and miss them so much. But, y'know, I'm happy for the good memories and all that. I hope once the pain subsides a bit you can enjoy your memories too.

I haven't really lost a band that means a lot to me (yet), but I suppose it's not a very different feeling. As with the memories of your cat, the music REM's made isn't going anywhere and you can revisit it whenever you want. It's very sad they won't be making new material (barring a reunion, which I wouldn't call outside the realm of possibility), but that doesn't have to change the good things you get from their music.

Anyway, those are my two cents, such as they are. Let me know if you need to talk sometime, okay? *hugs*

[etherati.livejournal.com]

I hate how vividly we're capable of remembering, sometimes. It makes memories feel like a crowbar to the ribs. But of course I wouldn't give them away, I just wish they hurt less.

[lotus0kid.livejournal.com]

Ain't it the truth? I feel like I remember everything, sight, feel, sound- even smell (I could pass on that one, actually).

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Smell is processed in the same area of he brain as memory, that's why it's such an intense memory trigger. Sights, sounds etc can consciously remind us of things--remind us to remember them--but the right smell can drop us into being-memory of entire parts of our lives, without any collaboration on our part.

So, idk, I just kinda go with that one. Only way we'll ever be able to time travel, after all.

[lotus0kid.livejournal.com]

Definitely. Just wish I had better scent-memories for my cats than their yawn breath. I loved them like crazy, but... ugh.