13 July

I'm remembering things all the time now, realizing and remembering. It's like I'm in this semi-comatose state and everything around me, every physical bit and every memory, is kind of hidden behind this haze. I am remembering: things that I have forgiven but I cannot forget. All those little unvindicated wrongs that alone could be dismissed as an out-of-character transgression, but together form one great unforgivable glob of Sin like a pallet of meat that won't pass. I had forgotten. But I can not have forgiven.

I forgot about Bella, the cat we found under Meemee's house when I was ten, the first animal that I really came to love. I would sit outside with the kittens until they became more and more desensitized to my presence, and eventually would come and knead up against my knees, and I would giggle as their mother Maiowed in alarm. There was Boots, Bella, Zoe and Tiger. Boots and Zoe disappeared one day into the woods after falling from the utility room roof; Tiger bolted when at the sale of my grandmother's house we attempted to cage her and give her to Mum's cousin Melanie. But Bella was my cat, in love with me and with nobody else. No one else could touch her. Quite truthfully I was more fond of that cat than I am of my father. And in some ironical show of his apathetic selfishness, I cried and pleaded for her not to be given away, and he laughed at me. He isn't fond of cats.

And of course he promised that we could go visit her (in Dunlap?) as often as I liked but of course that isn't fair to either me or the new parents, like open adoption. So he smiled his selfish set grimace and I haven't since then seen my Bella. (How obsessed was I with that cat? Ask anyone who was my friend at the time! And he knew! After every animal he has never had to bother with and I have taken care of, he had to tanker her away!) Of course we haven't ever "visited" her; that's an inconvenience he would never bother with once the deal is done and he thinks I've been appeased. She stuck her paw out at me as the rear bumper of Melanie's truck backed away, and she knew and I knew that we would never see each other again; the only animal I loved and the only thing she knew, and I cried till my face was sopping and my father set his face into an inconvenienced grimace. Yes, father, sadness is inconvenient; grief is inconvenient; children are inconventient. Haven't you learned that? How have you not learned that sacrifice is love?

That was the final bang, the crucifixion of all my illusions about my father. I was twelve years old. That was the first time he had ever seen me cry, and I swear to God it will be the last.