This morning I woke up spontaneously at three in the morning because my balls hurt. At this point I’m quite sure I’ve got an inguinal hernia, and trying last night to push the protruding fold of intestine back into my body wasn’t that good of an idea. I’m supposed to visit my general practitioner about this on the 13th. I was already awake, so instead of going back to bed, I sat at my desk and worked on my novel until six in the morning.

After a tiresome day at work, I returned home to find out that my elderly cat, about seventeen years old, had jumped out of the balcony. Although she’s on her last leg and at times I’ve feared that a simple scare would end her, she managed to survive wandering around the neighborhood for hours. One neighbor recognized the cat, so I have her back. However, since a couple of days ago, it’s like a switch has flipped in this cat’s brain, and suddenly all she does, apart from sleep, is either roam around the place as if she’s looking for someone, or stare slowly at her immediately surroundings as if in a daze. When you put her down on a surface, she lies there in the same position, as awkward or uncomfortable as it may be. She doesn’t purr anymore either; I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t recognize me. Maybe she had a stroke or something. Three weeks ago she went through her first scary illness, some sort of pneumonia. She wheezed constantly for about five days, but she had seemed to recover fully from it. Her current behavior came out of nowhere.

My other cat, the previous cat’s only surviving daughter, has looked even worse for weeks. She started peeing out of her box, in other rooms, for no apparent reason. She also meows at me as if to point out the fact that she peed somewhere else. She has gotten thinner and thinner, practically skeletal, and her meows have become weak mewling. The vet didn’t seem to find anything wrong with her other than being old. She’s on special food, but she isn’t improving.

Years ago, my first cat was killed by a pitbull. I suffered the first breakdown of my adult life, after a total mental breakdown at about 18 when I realized that life wasn’t going to get any better. After that cat died, I cried and cried for what seemed to be hours, and ever since, I only need to remember her in order to get teary-eyed again. I don’t even remember good moments that aren’t tainted by the fact that she died. Although these surviving cats won’t die the same way, I anticipate that my brain will store their memories in a similar fashion: the associated pain will get added to the mound accumulated in these last thirty-eight years of living, and to keep sane, I’ll have to forget them as best as I can.

I’m not coming up with any original idea when I say the following: I’d rather have a loved one die suddenly that waste away to the point that death would be a mercy. I haven’t experienced anything worse than creatures I loved becoming so sick or broken that I couldn’t do anything but put them down or wait for them to die. I have decided that I won’t get any new pets after these ones; I have a very limited capacity to tolerate daily anguish without losing it, and I have always been on a tightrope in that regard.

My brain is likely broken when it comes to memory-making: I barely remember any good moments, as if genuinely I hadn’t had more than I can count with one hand, while the bad memories are like a hill I’m regularly forced to clamber up, thanks to intrusive thoughts and insomnia. I’m not sure if a lifetime of chronic depression is responsible for that. In any case, you become a cautious human being: why would you risk meeting new people or having fancy experiences, when in the end you’d only add to the growing pile of misery?

I’ll never be a father, but there’s that cliché of fathers refusing firmly to get a cat or dog for the kids. Soon after the pets appear, though, that father becomes enamoured with them. Of course you are going to love them. And when they die, it’s going to break your fucking heart.

Although I sound like I’m despairing, I’m either not, or I’ve adopted over the years a sort of automatic stoicism because the alternative is losing your mind and jumping off a cliff. I expect everything to get progressively worse, and as if to prove me right, it more often than not does.

Regarding this whole thing, I think about the following Jason Lytle song somewhat often:

Anyway, tomorrow Saturday I’ll wake up at about six or seven in the morning to finish editing the next chapter of my ongoing novel. It’s going to be a juicy one. After two years of living vicariously through that tale, I have no clue how I’m going to find myself once I can’t look at the world through that framework anymore.