what’s real

veterinaryrambles:

Perhaps someday, when I die with white and thinning hair and age-spotted skin and my bones sharp beneath the blankets, some will pity me.

“Look at that childless woman,” they might say.  “She had no family at the end.  She must have been lonely.”

They might have a few facts right, but they would be terribly wrong.

***

My children are cats and dogs and small creatures curling into the crook of a person’s arm, a cold nose snuffling against a searching palm, an inquisitive meow in the dark, the type of fur that dries tears.  My children bark and purr in homes across the city, precious, beloved, family.  They are there when love falters and the bed is far too large; there when an elderly woman stands in an empty apartment and clicks her tongue at the small dog at her feet.  They are there after the funeral, when the child’s room feels so small and the cat remains the only one who still sits at the foot of the bed.  They are there on summer nights, on winter mornings, in spring breezes, answering to names ridiculous and sweet.  I revel in them while they visit, grateful when I can restore them to themselves.

And I grieve when, eventually, they go.  My hands remember every one.

***

And beyond them, my patients, my life swells with meaning; stories that spin from my fingers, words dripping and dancing with weight, with laughter, with tears.  If they are fiction what does it matter?  They are no less true to me.  My characters live and breathe beneath my fingertips, beautiful in ink and graphite.  Words trip into art, stumble into music, and beneath all of it a thrumming creativity, the engine that stirs my guts and bones.

I have stood on a soundless mountain beneath a fiercing desert sun; I have smelled creosote and juniper in hollow canyons.  I have seen the glory of a green heron in flight across the still grey water; I have whispered the names of Lawrence’s goldfinch and the red-winged blackbird through parted lips.  I have stared the coyote in her amber eyes, and I have found myself in pine, in oak, in manzanita.

I have known love, known it aching in the chambers of my heart, in the tears in my eyes, in the smile spreading wide and true across my face.  I have held the hand of my husband with our rings clinking and the sound mingling with waves on the Oregon shore.  I have known joy, joy, joy.

***

Perhaps, when I die, my life will seem small to some.  I do not mind.  My life does not belong to them, to the naysayers. 

It is mine: coruscating, temporary, ordinary.  

It is real.