There are two cats that prowl my small house. One is a large tabby whos name is Linguine. I love him a lot. He’s some what mellow and I had him first, so he is a like a big brother to my younger smaller cat who is named Jefferson.

Jefferson is white cat with a zigzag black stripe down his back ending on his tail. Speaking of his tail, it leaves his body and makes a right turn and subsequently a few zigzag moves of its own. We’re not sure but we believe it could have happened when he was born.

When I brought him home Linguine beat him up and terrorized him as cats have want to do. Jefferson spent lot’s of time on his back fending off my larger tabby. He cried pitifully as he was mauled.

I have noticed lately though that even though the size difference hasn’t changed much that Jefferson has been getting the upper hand in their exchanges. He retailiates now and I notice that he has a habit of seemingly not paying any attention and then pouncing on Linguines head or back and meeting out his own punishment.

Linguine has become a lot more cautious and I see him running away at times with Jefferson in pursuit. My little black and white Assassin!

Just a pretty, witty, little ditty.

Keeping you on your dance hall toes.

Something you wouldn’t see from Walter Mitty.

Oh no, not this expressive musical prose.

Why, why, why has it all come to this? Do you know what I am talking about?

Let me remind you. It was that time you went dancing. I saw you. I didnt know you, we had never met, but still I sat there over my drink and imagined what it would be like to be in your life.

It got pretty convoluted pretty fast. I don’t know if it had much to do with the alcohol. My imagination has always been vivid and taken me through flights of fancy.

It got to the point where we had fucked, held each other, married and gone to some far off land to live our life in fantasy. Why didn’t you hold up your part of the bargain?

Perhaps if I had asked you to dance!

Is that the sound of a shovel, scraping away at the earth? Is someone looking for lost treasure or are they digging a grave. There could be so many possibilities.

I could be listening to the start of a garden, or the search for a pipe. In this heat it means sweat! Maybe they are looking for water, not likely, we’re in town.

Perhaps they are filling in the potholes in the road. God knows it needs it! The lime they put down gets washed away leaving an obstacle course. Vehicle suspensions don’t last long here. Especially with the speed bumps.

I hope it’s a garden. I love the green, the boisterous, riotous green. In all its shades and hues. The shapes of the leaves, the size of the trunks and the fruit that is borne on them! I come from drought and brown. Golden fields of wheat lying on the ground, or sage brush that has some how managed to stay alive with minimal to no water.

Here the life shoots out of the ground. Things grow overnight! That’s what happens with deluges hitting the ground on a regular basis.

The fruit that grows, along with the vegetables. Come to think about it, I think that I will have a cucumber salad.

I am turning sixty three in twenty days.

I live in Belize. I am retired, I volunteer at a cat sanctuary, I visit friend’s a couple days a week and try to stay out of soul destroying distractions on my days off.

I feel just as lost as I did when I was thirteen. Where have I gone wrong? I see the images of happy people and I know they are not the truth most of the time, or they encapsulate a moment. I think mostly we are walking around putting on a show. I can often feel myself drowning in an obsidian pool of loneliness, even though I have friends that I visit often.

Is this what there is? A time of opposing struggle and contendedness, or in the middle somewhere? It is, because it is what I have lived, enjoyed and endured. I create with food. I love my friends and cats. Do I love myself? That is a question that has no meaning to me. I was never enough for my father and I have never allowed myself to be enough for me.

I am always one slip away from losing it all! That is what runs through my head most of the time, but when I look back it’s not all bad! Some regret, sure. The job of not letting the regret swallow the good in morose indulgence is the challenging part.

I was brave and adventurous enough to drive five thousand five hundred kilometers to Belize, across 2 international borders, because I made connections with people here, something I never had at home.

I can’t blame others for that. Mostly l was afraid of being rejected, so I never extended myself much. Here I extended my being and have not been rejected, yet still I feel empty and with no purpose.

I am going to start writing to see if that will help me find my way through the jungle of my mind. I will continue to meditate, stretch and feed myself healthy food(mostly). I will try to be less judgemental and continue to give others grace and hopefully some for myself.

From Crooked tree and the UK, only part of your journeys to come here, together on this day, in Bullet Tree, Belize.

From a home in San Ignacio where your family, Peter, Jennifer, Kayleigh and you both, Craig and Ishawn welcome humans and cats into your lives

I am proud to be part of this journey, as I think I can say we all are, and I look forward to a future being part of it!

I was laying in bed this morning having a waking dream where I envisioned you both standing in front of an alter, talking about your commitment to each other, covered in butterflies. Red, yellow, purple, blue and orange in many shapes and sizes. Their delicate legs resting on you both.

As you say your vows to each other and seal your marriage with a kiss. I see them all come together to enrobe you both. A living organism of one.

Now this may just be a poet’s whimsical fancy, but I know that you will together make a couple of one and you will provide your future family with all the love and beauty that they need to grow and flourish, as you have, witnessed by this day and place.

I love you.

I sweat every day, sometimes from start to finish. I am loved though. I am challenged by my addiction through these covid days and nights. Sometimes it feels like I am losing, but I know it’s just a stop on the journey.

I’ve wrestled with these demons and angels for a long time, so long that I can’t tell the difference anymore. I have been thinking I want to focus more on mindfulness for a few days, just as I think my grip on reality is slipping away like my will to find someone who cares.

I am full of barriers to my soul. Do they want my money? What about me is appealing? Have I left it to long? I am not the right shape. Will l be taken advantage of? These old clothes have been with me for so long and fit me so well that they are hard to cast off.

I have made a big start! I have come to a new place and engaged many, but l still am reluctant to put myself before the window and that makes me do things I am not proud of. Dangerous things, mindless, self damaging things that eat at my confidence and make me even more reluctant to reach out,

but I am here.

I’m walking along the road kicking rocks. I can look up at the blue instead, but I am so lost inside that I look down into myself while I kick rocks.

The road isn’t paved. I don’t know when I left the pavement, but it must have been awhile ago. All I see now is a dusty grey road with rocks.

There’s green around me and blue. How I love blue spruce! Evergreens in general. They are colorful in all seasons and they stand stark against the blue. I must remember to look at the blue.

If I don’t look at the blue I will get lost in the rocks. Most of my life I have kicked rocks instead of looking ahead and up. I am afraid that I will get lost in the forest so I stay on the safe road. Dawdling along, kicking rocks.

It’s time, 61 years of time, to get off the road and into the forest. Looking among the fir spires at the blue. I may trip and fall. I will have to look down every once and awhile.

I want to open up to that. I want to be afraid and excited. There was a time when I embraced the blue light and marvelled at what was around me. It was a rich time. Full of the light of Love.

I sit here weeping so hard the skin on my face is taut. My mouth a gaping opening.

It leads to inside me where this connection to pain comes from. I wonder what colour it is there?

Is it black from the years I felt abandoned? Perhaps yellow from the fear I have shirked so often.

Maybe red from the long simmering rage that lies there erupting every once awhile to blow a lava coloured bubble through the grey bile of despair that covers it all, or is it the colour of the tears streaming down my face.

I can’t see the colour of raw, but I can feel the colour of raw. It’s the words on this page.

I walk through a cemetery where I needn’t worry about social distancing. The people I pass there don’t care. It’s a strange feeling walking by markers that say that someone lived at such and such a time. It’s just names, dates and a few lines that represent someone’s life.

As I walk out behind the cemetery into the barren hills that only the hardiest shrubs grow on, I wonder at the layers of rock and sediment that constitute the odd lava like slopes that have been carved by millennia of rain and erosion.

In this strange wonderland I explore. Occasionally wondering what would happen if I fell and hurt myself. Would they ever find me ? I make sure to take my phone.

It’s a odd dichotomy. Cresting a hill to see a Walmart. Nestled into the side of such ancient land. A cemetery on one side and the graveyard of shopping on the other. How many small retailers has Walmart killed?

Eventually I return home to live in a house that is only partially mine. It will sell and I will live somewhere else, but for now I think, write and feel. What else can I do. Oh ya and try to dodge COVID 19.

It’s the feeling part that is the hardest. I am used to using my brain, not my heart. I am closer to the cemetery than not, but still I struggle with my feelings, and can I survive without suppressing them.

I want my gravestone inscription to say “here lies a man who felt” and perhaps my words will last longer than me. My legacy. My somewhat accurate description of how I felt, subject to interpretation.