My Love Is For Real

How'd it take a long, long time?

I am currently feeding my dog almost exclusively rice and boiled chicken (a “bland diet,” as the veterinarian tells me) because about two weeks ago she swallowed a corn cob, about two inches in length and perhaps two centimeters in width, and had to have emergency surgery to remove it from her digestive tract. I discovered she’d swallowed a corn cob because she vomited nine times in 24 hours — actually, she didn’t vomit, technically she was regurgitating, since the things coming out of her mouth were undigested food and water — so I took her to the emergency room, where they did between three and five (I cannot remember) diagnostic procedures, including an x-ray, which revealed the corn cob wedged in her small intestine. Apparently corn cobs have a “very distinctive profile” on x-rays. 

The hospital wanted to charge me about eight months’ worth of my rent to extricate the corn cob through a procedure called an enterotomy, so I signed a bunch of papers saying I was removing my dog from their care against medical advice and took her home. In the car on the way from the ER to my house, I played something on the speakers, hoping to distract myself by singing along to it, but it was impossible. Suddenly every grief I have ever felt closed in on me until all I perceived was me screaming, screaming and clutching the steering wheel, and the dark rain around the car and the dog in the backseat with no idea what was going on. All she knows is being alive. 

Three hours later I got out of bed and drove to Chicago Ridge (that’s a small town on the southwestern edge of Cook County) to the Animal Welfare League. I left the house at 5 in the morning so we could be first in line, and luckily we were. I don’t remember much of what happened there. I waited in the car, reading the new edition of Jess Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. (I ended last summer reading the first edition of this book and am starting this summer reading the new one, which feels significant in a way that I don’t totally understand yet but feel fairly certain I will at some point in the future. I am very much looking forward to unwrapping this gift from my life to me.) It was silent in the car, and silent outside, even as other people with pets started to pull up in the parking lot. 

At some point they called us inside. The vet tech opened the door to the exam room, where I sat on the floor while Mira paced around, then asked me a bunch of questions about Mira’s behavior, then took her to do another x-ray which confirmed that yes, indeed, she had swallowed a corn cob and would have to have surgery to remove it. I signed more papers — this time they said “your dog is high-risk and might die” in medical jargon — and drove home. 

They operated; she did not die. The next day I brought her home and in the car was able to listen to some music for the first time in what felt like a month though really it had only been a couple of days. I put on “haunted country porch,” a playlist assembled by my friend Chuck that is supposed to evoke the feeling of sitting “on a creaky porch looking out across an overgrown field at golden hour feeling like your heart might just burst.” When Chuck shared it with me, there were lots of songs on it I already knew and just as many that I didn’t, but now I know them all. Listening to it feels like well-earned intimacy, like real comfort. In that moment, in the car, driving home, Mira’s belly shaved and cut open and sewn back together and her eyes clearly drugged but somehow still alert, HCP, as Chuck calls it, was a ground wire. 

At the hospital, they gave Mira a giant cone to wear (I mean giant, it’s like 20 inches in diameter??? I’ve never seen a cone this big.) so she won’t lick her wound (what I wouldn’t do for a metaphorical giant cone sometimes…), and she has to wear it for eight more days, which means I have to lift her head while she walks up stairs for eight more days, and she can’t go outside except to pee or shit, which means she’s pretty bummed, for eight more days. But she’s alive.

Meanwhile, I am struggling with a few basic things. I can’t seem to string words together; this is the fourth draft of this newsletter I’ve started in the last two days. 

I have very little appetite, which I don’t notice until I’m with other people during times of the day when one would normally eat a meal and they want to eat and I don’t. Even the thought of eating makes me nauseated.

I have a hard time falling asleep and too easy of a time waking up, usually around 5:45 or 6:15 AM, my hands sore from having been in fists all night, little half-moons in my palms carved by my fingernails.

As for music, I’m not listening to much of anything I don’t already know, and I can’t really focus on full albums. But last Friday I had lunch with a friend, and while I waited for him I stepped into a record store and bought the latest Sharon Van Etten album, Remind Me Tomorrow. I’ve spun it a few times since, and I’ve been able to sit with it enough to start to understand what I like about it.

I love how much Sharon screams on it. I love how she sings “my love is for real” on “Jupiter 4” and it sounds like a threat — I feel that way, too, sometimes. I love that she’s just singing on most of the tracks, has left the instrumentation to other people. I love that she did a fade-in (on “Seventeen”) in 2019. 

I read the liner notes and they made me cry:

This record is dedicated to Zeke, my partner in crime, who has held my hand while I try to be all the things I want to be. Together we are constantly unfolding and can conquer the world — and to Denver, who is the sum of our love.

Listening to Remind Me Tomorrow, I feel my focus returning, which makes me feel like other things can return, too. Sometimes it seems counterintuitive that, for example, in order to lull the body to sleep we need singular focus from the mind. That’s why we do things like count sheep. So I’ll count these sheep until it’s not so hard to sleep, or until I feel hungry again, or until words come out in ways that make sense to anyone other than me. To borrow from Rilke: no feeling is final.