sunday, three october: the world
(the world: "it signifies completion, harmony, and contentment. It's rare to experience this energy, as we are usually consumed by wanting, needing, and achieving. So when this card appears, contemplate for a moment the idea of 'being whole'.")
I've been... okay I hesitate to call it running, even though running is involved. I've been going for very brisk walks in the morning before work. I don't want to talk about it. But lately I've been seeing one of my new neighbors--you have to understand, I'm out there at like five thirty, five forty-five in the morning. I see the guys who run the bodegas hanging out and smoking, I see some people heading out to work, I see an old lady a few blocks over who sits on her stoop in a nightgown and never says hello back when I say hello to her.
This new neighbor, she's out there most mornings now, with her cats. She has two of them, smallish tabbies with big startled-looking eyes. She opens the door to the apartment building and sets up a lawn chair on the sidewalk, and she sits in the chair reading a magazine and smoking weed while the cats explore a little bit. Sometimes when I see them the cats are nosing around the plants at the edge of the sidewalk, other times they're standing in the front hall of the building, seemingly uninterested in crossing the threshold.
Declan used to play with the kid next door--through the whole pandemic lockdown, they played together through the fence separating our yards. They passed lego and markers and sticks to each other through the fence, and threw balls at each other over the top, and there were a few months there where Gus was the only kid Declan ever really saw in person. Gus's family moved away about a month ago--the landlord next door is crap and doesn't maintain the building, so the basement was infested with rats, and rats were coming up through their walls. Both of the first-floor apartments, Gus and his parents but also the people on their other side, who had two big dogs and used to have movie nights with a projector in their yard, left because of the rats. The rats don't make it up to the second floor, but the building has been under-maintained for long enough that birds had tunnelled under the shingles and were nesting inside the walls up there. Rumor had it that the third floor had been taken over by squirrels, but those apartments were vacant for a while because, again, the landlord doesn't really care enough to work on it. I'm not sure if the cat lady is on two (sparrows) or three (squirrels), but no one has moved in on the first floor yet. I guess even the crap landlord can't rent the apartment while it has an active rat problem.
This sounds kind of horrible because it is kind of horrible. I probably shouldn't dwell on it. We miss Gus, though, and his parents. It's still very strange to be out in the yard and never see them.
We're two and a half weeks from moving to the new house. With the flooding happening so close to the start of the school year, and the school year giving off a definite "hit the ground running" energy, and splitting time between here and the new place, and the still unholy amount of time I'm spending in the car getting from here to there and back, ugh, where even was that sentence going. Oh, right, perpetual motion. Not just that I am perpetually in motion, but that we're constantly having to move things. There are stacks of things that get moved multiple times a day, from the kitchen table to the bed to the floor etc, because it is not currently possible to have things In Their Places because all of the places have been upended. Over time, some of those stacks of things get put into boxes, stacked up in the corners and thus out of the way, or bags, carted up to the new house or dropped off at Goodwill, and order is slowly (slowly) forming out of chaos.