Kyubey

I have been feeling mentally uneasy for days. For most of the summer, I felt intact. As school ended, I felt happiness for the reprieve to just write and the potential of a few months. That is to be expected.

I cannot attribute my uneasiness wholly to summer drawing to a close, but neither can I wholly say that is not a factor. I would almost like to say it is owing to a disrupted sleep cycle from vacation, but that was a week ago.

This is preamble to walking out of the house around nine at night because the feelings welling are growing septic and tense. They want a fight. I do not want a fight and understand this as some aspect of a mental illness. I am aware of what I am not.

All this because Amber asked me to move my writing supplies that I've stored in an ottoman, even though the reason I absconded with this ottoman was to store my inks and pens. She has been redecorating the bedroom and felt this piece of furniture belonged there, but that it should hold something bedroom-related instead. She had nothing in mind but stated that things should be stored as closely to where they will be used as possible. Where the ottoman is was once my writing nook, then her computer area until this redecorating. The ottoman is exactly where it belongs, though not when.

There had been other things building over the last few days. The grains were real, tiny annoyances that I would ordinarily shrug off, amplified into problems. The ottoman issue is where it became too much, because I would have considered an alternate location on my own if she didn't remind me yet again in the shower and try to justify again why she wanted it empty for some unknown future purpose.

I wanted to be out of the apartment a little while. I didn't want to go far, to the other side of the driveway where there is a hill. I lied down in the damp grass (but it hardly mattered because I'd just had a shower) and stared up at the stars. The night sounds, tree peepers and crickets and whatever else sings for mates and warnings in the dark, was on the border of overwhelming. The sky was clear enough that I can see, even without my glasses, tiny lights of far distant planes. I saw sometime like a star wink bright and vanish. I saw one shooting star for certain, maybe another. I thought my present mantra, stolen from Kurt Vonnegut, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is," until I believed it. I don't spend enough time appreciating without having to execute some plan or other. It is good to sit in the night, knowing in a few months that I would give anything to be able to be outside at this hour.

After half an hour, I feel enough like myself that I walk the fifty feet back to my apartment. Amber has left the light on for me.

When I enter, she is crying, holding our hamster Kyubey to her chest. I put an arm around her to comfort her. I didn't want to hurt her or make her cry.

I don't say this to her because she is on the phone. Is she calling someone about my brief absence? And why is it my phone she is on? Whose numbers has she written on a small card before her?

I look at the hamster, whose eyes are half shut, and understand she isn't crying because I left in a snit.

Her phone had died. She went to care for the pets and found Kyubey in this state. She suspected wet tail, a condition that sounds almost cute, but is fatal diarrhea. She called around for any animal hospital that might be open at this hour to see an exotic.

The remnants of my snit evaporate. I want to help. The only aid I can render is pointing out that I have the number for the back office of her animal hospital. It is well after hours and no one picks up. She then texts one of the doctors with whom she is friendly, who calls her back, agrees this is an emergency, and they meet at the hospital.

I am left alone for half an hour, wondering if things might have been different if I had been stable. I don't think they would have. Days prior, Amber and I went to the Dutchess County Fair, staying out late. When we arrived home, Kyubey's cage was open and she was missing. Our cats seemed ignorant of the existence of this fluffy rodent on whom they would obsess. We searched a while before I trusted my hunch and checked under our bed, down a staircase from her cage and past a box fan we use to keep the cats out of our room. There she was, looking none the worse for wear that we could tell. At least, we saw no blood and she acted normally through Sunday and possibly Monday.

Amber returns with medicine, her own handwritten label attached with a rubber band, and sets to trying to force it and fluids into the hamster's system. I am useless to this, though am eventually given the duty of watching the hamster for continued breathing while she lays on a hot water bottle. It is late and I am tired, but I tell Amber I will stay up while I can. I know that she will not relax her vigil this night, unless the hamster relaxes it for her by dying.

I last until midnight, before wishing her well with a kiss and going downstairs to bed.

Kyubey lasts another half hour. Amber comes downstairs, kisses me awake, and tells me that our hamster has passed. I hold her and tell her I am so sorry, for the death of course but also for not being there when I should have been.

"It's not fair," she said, "we got her from a breeder so we could keep her longer."

She comes to bed some time after this. I had taken my night meds, so I cannot be certain how long. I know that she weeps, and I hold her, but I am not fully conscious while it is happening.

Amber is arguably the best person I've ever known. I do not mean that she is peachy, and I love her, though she is and I do. I mean she is kind, sweet, funny, honest, and brilliant (I proof her papers, so I can promise the last). She is less polluted, less self-obsessed, less damaged than anyone I know. She is compassionate with me when I am hard to tolerate. She gives so much of herself to the pets.

I can never know where she would be had I not found her, but she is lovely. I can't imagine someone else wouldn't have noticed. Without her, I don't expect I would have accepted I didn't have an eccentric personality and not mental illness. In treatment, I became the person I am now, one I like better.

Owing to my psycho-biological imbalances, I am not always the man Amber deserves, though I try to control my "sulking," as she put it.

I don't want to pollute something so pure. I want to keep her safe from the unpleasantness within me, though I cannot as often as I would like.

Soon in Xenology: Writing. The Sheet.

last watched: The Haunting of Hill House
reading: Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates