Handel

I suppose I have been feeling existential for a few reasons lately, but none so much as the fact that I had to euthanize and then bury my 17 year old cat who I adopted when he and I were both kittens.

Handel AKA Bubby AKA My Fancy Footed Furry Feline Friend (among many other aliases over the years) was the most constant and wonderful source of love in my life outside of blood relations. He was perfect, fearless, loving, and the most beautiful white and black polydactyl with a little pink nose who ever lived. He lived 17 long and glorious years, and he still left this earth too soon.

The second most compelling reason for my current existential crisis is a corresponding bout of personal health challenges. Long story short, I have eczema plus a perfect storm of environmental triggers, leaving me with, in a phrase, monster hands.

Believe me when I tell you I do not take these words lightly, nor do I enjoy creating my own euphemistic nickname in mockery of myself. Allow me this poetic license for the sake of drama. What I have gone through in these last months felt like a personally tailored nightmare. My once capable hands juggled plates and glasses and demolished walls and moved friends and typed billions of bytes and managed replacing batteries and alternators and belts in my old jeep and helped hands and held friends and I could go on, but...important sidebar...Let it not be forgotten that one of my dominating literary and performance characters is butch mystique. She is born of nothing less than 100% me and my beliefs. Ever since I got over my youthful desire to have long delicate fingers, I have found pride in having strong capable hands. And in case it has not dawned on you yet, dear reader, for a queer woman, her hands are her sex, swinging in plain view for all to see. Capable of great strength and tenderness all in one. ...getting back around to what it means to this butch to have capable hands...I will let you infer the rest of your way through the ultimate challenge this period had on my very core identity. Case = rested.

So I withdrew into a cocoon. Skin conditions have the terrible side effect of rendering you paranoid of absolutely every possible trigger. You start with the obvious and work until the symptoms abate. Some people spend years suffering. I count myself lucky to have lost only a season. Regardless, I cut my bathing time in half. I worked from home, A LOT. I was bandaging sometimes as many as four or five fingers a couple of times per day. I could not cook or clean as much so I ate a lot of prepared foods. Ugh. It has been hell.

What is the silver lining to every wave of suffering in life? The period where you get sick of your own stink. That is the true test of character. What do you do when you are at the deepest place in the pit of your own despair? What life lessons will you extrapolate from your loss? In this case, I decided that I was going to have to take it on the chin. I must go to work. I must bandage my fingers meticulously. Type without activating the open cuts on my fingertips. Learn how to exercise without making it worse. Whew. I could go on for days, but alas, I have finally reached that silver lining which includes being sick of myself. I am sick of thinking, talking, contorting my life around these particular challenges. I just want to become highly skilled in living with it until it is naught but a memory...at least until the next round of hell if I should be so lucky. At least I will know better if it happens again.

The day these photos were taken, I bandaged up my monster hands and buried my cat. What better way to caption the ending of this experience, than to split open a finger tip wielding the shovel? Luckily, it is healed, and I went to work today bandage free. This is progress.

RIP Bubby. The day you returned to the earth was just as magical as you were, however tragic. I will miss you forever.