It’s 1:30 AM Monday morning and I can’t sleep.
I’m a mess tonight emotionally.
The last few days have been bad, leading to now. After tossing and turning, bawling in my bed, screaming in tears, I had to do something, so I got up to write.
Saturday I had to bury another friend. I’m sick of it. I still haven’t gotten over the death of Shelby, the most wonderful cat that could ever be part of a person’s life.
About 17 years ago, my ex and I opened our door one morning to find a thick-furred female cat outside, wanting to come in. A few weeks later she gave birth to three beautiful kittens in our bathroom. We found a home for her and for one of the kittens, a male. The two females, both a tortoiseshell and a calico, we kept.
The calico we named, appropriately, “Callie.”
She was a real cuddle muffin. She always wanted to play, and when she chased string, she was fast and furious. She would always sit on a book you were reading, wanting to be petted. She climb onto your shoulder while you were sitting at the computer and would fall asleep. She’d butt her head against yours to rub you and make contact with you.
Her purr was so incredibly loud and wonderful.
She had a stroke recently. She was old, and her body was failing. We took her to the vet the week before last, and the vet said she would recover if we gave her potassium and thyroid pills. The vet was a good vet, but she made a mistake. Instead of recovering, Callie got worse. Her back legs started giving out, and three days ago she couldn’t walk at all anymore.
It was clear she was dying. Friday the vet confirmed that a blood clot had caused her legs to fail.
Callie clearly was ready to go to her next life. I spent Saturday morning holding her close, playing with her a last time, letting her sleep in my arms. She purred and purred, loving every touch of my fingers along her cheeks and ears.
We took her to the vet that morning. Callie normally hated car trips and the vet’s office. That morning, she was peaceful and curious. She curled up in my ex’s lap, and was purring as the vet gave her the fatal injection. Callie then gently fell into an everlasting sleep.
None of us could imagine a better way to go to our next life.
I buried her in my ex’s back yard that afternoon. I had to pour boiling water to soften the frozen ground so I could dig the grave. Afterward, the mud was sticking to every bit of my clothing.
Things were stressed at my ex’s all day, as you can imagine. At one point I cracked. My daughter put her sweater down on my keys. When I went to get something out of my car, I couldn’t find them. I frantically searched the house for more than an hour. My ex has a spare of my car key, so I got in my car and went through it top to bottom. I scoured the back yard with a flashlight to see if my keys fell out of my pocket into a snow bank. I couldn’t take it. I was afraid I’d never find my keys again. I became afraid my Master would punish me horribly and lose trust in me for losing his keys. I couldn’t think straight. I collapsed into a corner of the room near the front door and started biting my arm very hard. I used to do that a lot during my year of hell, the period of depression I went through last year, but I haven’t bitten myself in a long time. But I bit myself on Sunday, again and again, hard enough to draw blood. When by chance I moved my daughter’s sweater and found my keys, I still felt awful. It took me a long time to get over it all.
Basically, Saturday sucked.
I found out from my ex about Callie’s condition Friday night while I was at the other slave’s house. Needless to say, it put a serious damper on the evening. Another slave and her Master had come over that night, and we were all planning to stay up late and have fun, with the slaves pampering the Masters and goofing around among ourselves. I had brought everything with plans to spend the night. The slave there made a wonderful dinner of beef stew. I could hardly taste it. I couldn’t enjoy the evening anymore. I wound up going home.
I have to admit, I don’t think I really trust the Master of that house. It’s hard to say exactly why. But he seems to have a mean streak. He smiles in a mean way. His slave told me that he hasn’t had sex with her in months, but he explicitly forbids her from masturbating, saying that her only satisfaction will come from him. He’s being considered for a three-year contract that would cause them to be uprooted and move to New York, and she hates the idea, but he’s explicitly forbidden her from asking him anything about the details of the contract. She said during dinner, desperate to talk to anybody, that her Master pushes her away at night when she tries to touch him in bed. As expected, he wasn’t happy that she aired his dirty laundry like that, but I could see the need in her eyes to express her thoughts. Later, she said she had to say it then because he wouldn’t let her talk about such things when they were alone.
But that’s all one sided. I only have her view on things. And yet, I can see the way he looks at her. I can see his expressions. The way his eyes move. His non-verbal body language. I don’t really trust him.
So even before I got the news about Callie, the day hadn’t been that fun at the slave’s house because of her problems with her Master.
The day before, Thursday, was one of the worst days I’ve had with my kids in a very long time. As I’ve indicated in previous post, we’ve been having wonderful times together and building up a tight bond. Thursday they seemed determined to break me emotionally. They taunted me and flat-out refused to do as I said. The simplest homework assignment was a nightmare to get them to do. I was tense and nervous the whole time I was with them. Something was out of kilter, left of center in a bad way.
And the day before, when I went to see my former Mistress, wasn’t great. After I dropped Master and M’Lady off at the airport, I drove to Mistress’s house, but a snowstorm hit just as I arrived. Not only that, but Mistress and I didn’t really hit it off that night. I didn’t feel any spark with her anymore. I enjoyed being with her, but I couldn’t sense the attraction we used to share so strongly. So when I announced I had to leave early because of the weather, we both simply agreed it was the thing to do, and without even a kiss goodbye she bid me on my way.
And then today. Sucky day. Master and M’Lady gave me a list of things to do, and I didn’t do them all, and I tried to catch up as much as possible today – without success. They expected me to do a lot of household chores with them out of the way, but I’m more behind than ever. Master wanted me to write an outline for my historical slavery presentation, but I didn’t yet. I was supposed to clean off the ton of unneeded files on my computer that’s clogging up the nightly backups. I didn’t yet.
And they got me a copy of the movie, “Up,” which I’ve heard is fantastic, and Master recommended I watch it while they were gone.
I spent almost four hours trying to watch the movie. Four horribly frustrating hours shot to hell.
Master has a cabinet bank of two DVD players, two TiVo’s, a stereo, a TV cable box and a Wii. They’re all controlled by one very complicatedly programmed controller. He left me instructions on how to play DVDs. I did something wrong, and the more I tried to fix things, the worse I got, and the more desperate I became. At one point, I tried to reset the TV and wound up turning off the powerstrip where everything was attached.
I told Master on the phone, and he was rather annoyed. I bothered him in Las Vegas to get him concerned about something I messed up that he can’t do anything about until he returns. I felt horrible, and I’m afraid of his wrath when he comes back. I feel like total shit.
Afterward, I took the movie upstairs, thinking to watch it on my computer. The damn movie disk doesn’t have a menu or English subtitles. I’m hard of hearing, and I have to have subtitles. The TV downstairs would have had subtitles, but my computer doesn’t. I tried everything, downloading more advanced DVD players and downloading subtitle files for “Up.” Nothing worked.
So, after spending almost four hours trying in vain to watch a movie, time that I desperately needed to catch up on my chores, I lost it a bit. I screamed into my pillow and cried for a very long time. Finally I decided to get up and write.
I hate technology sometimes. Really, truly hate it.
I had high hopes for this week. I thought I’d have some time for a bit of freedom in Master’s absence.
The week was fucking awful.
I wanted a break from the same old routine. I got a break, and I was broken in the process.
Master and M’Lady will be back this evening. I both long for them and dread their reaction to my failures.
Such is the life of a slave.
La kajira.
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