tuckova

twenty-first century fox

Once upon a time there was a fox. Foxes are awesome because they have all the playful bounce of dogs with an insouciant "don't need you" splash of cat-attitude (catitude? whatever). The fox is all, as long as I'm not living in England where the people have terrible teeth and hunt me, life is fine. Bouncy fox.

Foxes are omnivores so this fox ate a bunch of different things. Fruit, bread, bird food; even some chickens. Yeah I know about the unfortunate incident with the henhouse but we're actually going to be dealing with a different idiom here. 

So in the course of the merry bouncy life of this fox, lots of food. Some fantastic things. There was a bush of berries so sweet that it took some time to move away from it, and even though the berries were sweet only most of the time, and were in season only some of the time, still the fox stayed and ate them, mouth stained red with pleasure. Another period spent living near a farmhouse, eating mice, the excitement of chasing them, catching them, the fast gulp of consummation. A long time spent almost tame, living off what scraps were thrown its way, until the scraps turned from bits of tender fresh meat that could be ripped from the bone to dinner scraps to moldy bits begged from the back of the fridge and the fox knew it was time to move on.

And now the fox is out again, roaming. It's made a few poor food choices in life, shivering and heaving in the forest that runs alongside the houses, eating leaves to calm its stomach and thinking that anything that looks too good is bound to hurt. Thinking it would be better to never eat again than to feel this pain. Better to shrivel up.

One day the fox passes a vineyard, and remembers the taste of grapes. Some sweet, a bit of mold on them, the heady tail-chasing dance of that night. Some with seeds that crunched in the teeth and the juice ran down, sugar matted fur, the feeling of being completely sated. But the last grapes were a bad batch, sweet on the tongue but with a retching sour aftertaste, and now the fox isn't sure. Standing hesitant before the tidy rows of vines, and the fox doesn't know with certainty if the gnawing feeling is hunger or just curiosity, what it wants or if it even wants anything at all. 

between the bars

Sometimes I think I'm going to see you and I prepare fun stories in my head and then I realize that I'm not going to see you, that we're not like that now, and my whole little speech about how a diagnosis reads like a poem is totally shot, like our love of an/unspecified nature/suggestive/of malignancy.

I don't think I'm going to die today or even soon and sometimes I think that I have done some pretty poor planning in terms of my potential failure to die. Like the last time I did some life planning it was more like death planning and I was smoking a pack a day and drinking until the walk home was at best vague and now I'm hardly saintly but it occurs to me that retirement planning is like a real thing, like I am past the "good-looking corpse" clause if you know what I mean.

When Squire was wee he had a total meltdown on a plane where he was sure we were going to crash and die a fiery death. There was nothing to reassure him, and I felt then how empty such reassurance was, because this is exactly what you cannot prepare for, the surprise. Fat fear tears rolling down his cheeks, but he was brave and he was ready, even while he was beyond consolation. I might have turned around and gone home if we could have gotten home without flying. And yet what could I say: relax, you're not going to die. It's exactly what everybody says. It is exactly a lie.

I bought shampoo for gray hair today. I will probably never stop missing you.