cats at war

I wake to silence. I have said nothing about the way I am feeling but the rate he has been arguing with me I know he knows. 

In my sleep I have tucked my arm between my knees again. This is how I dislocated my own elbow a while back. The joint is only now, months later, feeling healthy. 

"Misty," he is whispering as he untangles my arm from the vice of my knees, "the moon." 

It must be about 5 am. He crawls over me off the bed to the window and stands blocking the view. "Can you see it?" he asks. 

I stare at his back through the darkness. In a few hours he will be gone again. Leaving me here to deal with our life alone.

This moment in time is no different from the life I didn't choose. The juggling act no less precarious, the stress no less real. 

On the farm the cats are at war with each other. They have forgotten they are cats and run their days like mini generals opportunistically attacking. I can feel them plotting and angry, stalking around. I don't want to live in a war zone, even a very small one.  

In my dreams I navigate anxiety in text book ways. I sit with my sister and try to figure out if she is dead or if her being dead is the dream... 

He may know my state of mind but he can't feel it. He doesn't understand, which is why he argues with me. Telling me what I shouldn't do, what I don't have to do. 

He argues about what time I should and shouldn't go to the hospital to see C-Boy's baby, not yet born. He argues about how long I should or shouldn't have stayed at work last night. About what my answer should have been to my editor's request to write for the paper again. 

He uses logic as if it applies to people. It doesn't. Perhaps it should but it doesn't. Like wanting medicine to be a science when really it is not science but an art form.

I tuck back into a little ball knowing if I don't get up now I will wake to regret later. But before I fall back into sleep I say, "It's absolutely beautiful."

Because I am sure somewhere beyond the window there is a lunar eclipse and that its beauty pales in comparison to the image of him standing there.