I woke up feeling fragile today, like the marrow had been sucked out of my bones while I slept leaving them hollow and echoing. The day in and day out sadness of caring for a cat with cancer is getting to me, and so is getting ready to give back Odie. I have fostered many cats for homeless people, some clients and some not, and there is always a bittersweetness to it. There's joy, of course, in seeing someone get housed after the prolonged war of surviving the shelters and the streets, but there's also the loss of a furry soul I have come to know. Usually the loss is just a twinge, but Odie is an especially soft, sweet guy and I am really going to miss him in my increasingly empty house.
I want to be swept away by the palpaple wave of relief that swept the City as the election results came in and it became clear that people power had prevailed over big money. It was great to see that grassroots mobilization can be effective, because it frequently doesn't feel like it any more. I'm often home on wednesdays, my day off, but I had to be up and on my way to the infusion center. I got to move through the city and feel people just really breathing for the first time in a long time.
Of course I'm relieved that this went our way, but I also know this is just one of many many battles ahead, that things we once thought unthinkable will keep happening, that reality will keep unraveling. I think about Alexis' battle against the moths in her old house upstate, the red thread against the grey wool marking each skirmish, like the scars left in the earth after war, visible from space.
I didn't have a single cell that wanted to come to work today, but we have a big fundraiser coming up, and clients who need me, so I put on my shoes and let them follow my routine of stairs and trains and staticky announcements. I was at my desk when Dilo came in and, in the formal tone he uses when the person at the door is an adult he doesn't know, annouced that Dean Lance was at the door. I have known Dean since I was 15 and his frizz of red hair was the only one brighter than my own at the weekly ACT UP meetings. We're both grayer now, and he's retired but sparkling with energy like always. He had come to donate two of his amazing drawings for the silent auction part of the fundraiser. He had had to dig for them because they are from 1992, original drawings from his film "A Hard Reign's Gonna Fall," which played at the Museum of Modern Art among other venues.
He set the drawings down on my desk in their glass frames. I looked down at the first one, a crowd of people in various ACT UP shirts carrying signs including the iconic bloody handprint "one AIDS death every half hour" which would get updated and updated when the half hour gave way to just minutes as the epidemic burned through our people. I felt dizzy for a minute like I had just been sucked into a the spinning vortex of a tornado. I looked up at Dean and said "I remember those signs," and then "I had those shirts - I still have one." "I wish I had bought more," he said "we literally wore them out," "Mine had stains and holes," I said. "We were getting dragged away in them," he replied. "I have to go," he said, breaking the spell. "I'm meeting Penny Arcade to go see - " and he named some artist I am not erudite enough to recognise.
After he left, taking 1992 with him as suddenly as it arrived, Misty got up and came over to look at the drawings, marveling at their intricate details. She put them safely away, and packed up. I waited until I heard the front doors of this old church close downstairs before I let the tears come raining down.
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