2004-01-09 12:38 p.m.
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So the past few weeks have been puncuated by some of the most horrible days I've ever lived.

I spent New Year's Eve and Day with the flu, that terrible, debilitating flu that's been going around that makes you yearn for the energy to drown yourself. My Steve and I had plans to go out to dinner on the eve of the New Year, perhaps to our favorite Mexican place, where a man with a guitar glides up to your table and plays romance in Spanish to an audience of two in candlelight, while the ancient gods on the walls sway and glance at each other knowingly. But instead, because I was so far from the ability to mobilize, we ordered takeout from the Diner and had a feast of our own in our living room.

Then there was Tuesday. Terrible Tuesday. I was late for work, rushed, and every person who came through the door was nearly abusive in attitude. I just wanted to go home, but alas, it became one of those days that presented trial after trial after trial. My car doors, when I was finally done with the drudgery of the day, were frozen. I pried open the passenger side door, and then the driver side. Then they would not close. My doors were frozen open. A half hour and a bit of fumbling around with the lock de-icer later, a witness would have found me speeding down the highway with the driver side door locked to keep it from opening (this only works sometimes) and the seatbelt wound through the window opening handle and clipped in to keep the passenger side door from opening too much while I made the trek home. In my driveway at last, the driver side door refused to grant me egress, so I climbed out the passenger side and decided to give it one last furious slam to see if it would close. It did. Into the house, where, at this point, all I want is to completely lose myself from this world, while sitting motionless, which means television, but that was also not to be. Cable wasn't working. Some channels came in, some didn't. No program data. Usually just a minor irritation, but that day it nearly broke my heart. What finally did make my heart break, clean, was when Steve and I decided to go to bed and we found Bianca dead in her cage. That was it for me. Two hours and a bathtub full of vomit later, I finally calmed down enough to wonder how it happened. First Igby and now Bianca. Perhaps the water is bad? Perhaps her cage was too small? She had been fine that morning, and her dish still had food in it. Somewhere in my one hundred and twenty minutes of madness, I envisioned somebody sneaking into my apartment and peppering her food with poison. I don't know why she died. But I miss her.

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