Emory

Sometime in the early morning, I woke up to my partner, Sarah, gently stroking my arm in her sleep. It was the cutest thing. I’d say I smiled and snuggled up to her in the bed, but who knows. I was tired and only remember her hand on my arm and the warm, light feeling in my chest. 

Later this morning, we properly woke up. My cat, Trashman, was being surprisingly good. I was proud of him and made sure to give him lots of pets as a reward. Trashman is a huge orange boy I rescued from the cat colony behind my building after his broken immune system decided that his teeth were foreign objects, rotted said teeth in his mouth, and almost starved him to death by making it too painful to eat. He was picking through garbage when I met him, hence the name. Also, he just seems like a Trashman.

Trashman has a big yell and lots of feelings, and he uses his big yell to hurl what I can only assume are expletives at me most mornings at 7:00 am. I am slowly teaching him that 1) he will still get fed if he doesn’t scream and 2) screaming at me, licking my armpit, and stepping on my face will not get me out of bed sooner. It will, in fact, only make me stubborn. This has finally, FINALLY started sinking in.

Gods, I love him. He’s a very sweet cat.

Next order of business (besides getting dressed, brushing teeth, etc.) was feeding my other resident kitty, Biscuit, and my foster cats, Anise and Clove. Anise and Clove are super sweet. Biscuit is super sweet and also completely insane. For example, Anise and Clove play with cat toys and give each other little kisses for fun. You know, normal cat things. Biscuit, despite being nearly blind, does flips off my furniture and walls and recently ate a party hat. I guess eating a party hat snack was her idea of fun. That was not my idea of fun, but I love her, and thankfully the emergency vet she and I spent my birthday weekend with confirmed that my crazy girlie would pass the one lingering chunk of hat that she hadn’t thrown up.

I have a hybrid social work internship, and when I don’t have any meetings on my schedule, I often spend the “at home” portion in coffee shops. So today Sarah and I went to a coffee shop with the plan that she would mess around on her phone and I would get work done, which I sort of did.

I’m putting together a packet on trauma informed care for direct support professionals who work with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I adore the folks I work with, support professionals and clients alike. I’ve met so many compassionate, messy, wonderful people through this work. As a disabled/neurodivergent/mad person, it’s been really healing to be a part of what they do, especially because not all organizations are doing good work with folks like the people we serve. I’m excited to be putting this packet together for my coworkers. They are interested in incorporating trauma informed care more directly into their employee training, and I like the idea of leaving behind something sustainable. It makes me feel better about leaving at the end of this month when I finish my program.  

So yeah, I did a little work, dropped Sarah off at home, and went to see a client. Client wasn’t available so I went to see another client and found myself leaving around the time the solar eclipse was peaking. I hadn’t bothered to get eclipse glasses, and I drove home without watching it. Based on all the people standing on the sidewalk looking up, it must have been behind me.  

Driving with my back to the eclipse was a spiritual experience. It felt a bit like asserting myself against the universe—you can’t make me watch the pretty cosmic light almost go out—and a bit like shedding. Like maybe I was walking away from my skin. I don’t know if eclipses are supposed to be a symbol of transformation or anything, but that’s how I experienced it.  

When I got home, I asked Sarah if she wanted to get Rita’s and go to the woods. Obviously, she said yes. So we got Rita’s and went to the woods. I had a mix of vanilla custard and wild cherry ice. It was delightful. I parked in the lot off Lincoln Dr. by Historic Rittenhouse Town and started taking Sarah to my favorite study spot by the water. We both have ADHD, so obviously that is not where we ended up. Up into the hills instead of down, left, right, up, up, up. “Oh hey, is that baseball? Oh my gods, a dog! Dog park! Dog park!”

Of course, we had to sit and talk near the dog park. She taught me about language stuff and stuck twigs in the ground. I anxiously rambled about how I want this summer to be better than the last ones. About how I want to heal. We held hands. A dog came over and licked our faces—a sweet, soft boy with shiny black and brown fur. Then we tried to find a bathroom, but the building with bathrooms was locked, and we realized we should probably head back.    

I made Sarah decide which train to catch home. She went with the 8:39 train because she has work tomorrow. It can be hard to say goodbye, but I’ll see her again this week, so this time wasn’t too bad. After she left, I listened to an Audiobook and made art. I’ve been getting back into art not because I want to be good at it (though it pleases me endlessly when I am), but because it’s an outlet. Like my cats, I am full of big feelings and bad ideas. I make art with pens (not always nice ones), watercolor pencils, melted wax, cut out paper, colored markers, stickers, poetry, and so on. Lately, I have been using a gold paint pen and wax seals to make collages. The collage fixation is thanks to my friend Ryleigh, who made some with me the other day when I was processing a breakup. (I am poly, and I’m finding it endlessly weird to grow so deeply in one relationship while grieving another, but that is neither here nor there). Anyways, I started collaging to get some energy out before bed, drinking nonalcoholic beer out of a teacup while I work because I’m the boring kind of freak.

I didn’t mean for the art to be meaningful when I started it, but as it stands now, it feels like a response to the eclipse I drove away from. So far, I have a man without his skin. A wax crown drips bronze down his face. His guts spill out, and some of them are laced with gold. His arms have been cut off and replaced with ornate bees. He has been made bare and rebuilt. He is grotesque, and of course I find that beautiful. 

Emory is a poet, cashier, and soon-to-be-graduated social work student living in north Philly.