Anaïs is beautiful

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anaïs is beautiful

Reader, Anaïs is beautiful. She is also, under that beauty, completely feral, and this is always a surprise to people because she comes in so warm and so fast that by the time they realize she is about to climb them like a trellis it is absolutely too late.

She loves women with a specific, physical, whole-body devotion that I find both embarrassing and aspirational.

She does not do this stuff because she is bad. Some of the things are innate naughtiness, it's true. But she does most of them because love fills her up past capacity and something has to give.

Her life is a series of ups and downs. First relaxing into the adoration of King Baby, her beloved reason for living, and the slightly less captivating love I have to offer — then suddenly violent, playing fiercely with nobody who is interested. Barking madly, making impossible demands. "Make it stop raining! Stop loving Ambrose and pay attention to me but do not observe me!"

Then before you know it, it's back to her soft fur and hot little body, curled up against you or swooning into you like a Brontë heroine.

She reminds me of the guy in Night of the Hunter whose knuckles are tattooed with LOVE and HATE and he shows you how they fight inside him. She is at constant war with herself.

She is terrific. She's beautiful and she is a handful.

She is hard to love; she is exactly my type.

ambrose is beautiful

Ambrose fears people. He fears men especially, which I can understand for sure. There was a year and half before he found us where any number of things might have happened to him. He was on Death Row, one day away from the end, before our grungy little rescue got ahold of him.

When my friend Matthew tested his first sample he came back gobsmacked: "Jacob, he has every kind of worm."

Ambrose was a nightmare; so much worse than Anaïs (not that Jason remembers it that way). He chewed at the walls for what we learned was the drywall's calcium, and chewed at every baseboard and every windowsill, and my hands, and my legs, and eventually he went away to a little boarding school where he was taught to be normal.

Ambrose has developed, over time, a management strategy for his little sister: he watches her, calculates the distance between where she is and where she needs to be, and then goes and baits her into chasing him directly to the correct location. Real problem-solving. Real desire to help.

He is gorgeous and he is very easy to love, but very easy to scare. This is also my type.

zooey

Zooey was a girl with a boy's name, which I think was right for her. When I got her, and named her, I grew up — not gradually, but overnight, someone had decided I was her person and I discovered I couldn't bear to let her down.

She made me into someone who knew how to take care of things. That I was both worthy of love and able to give it. That taking care of myself is very simple and very boring work. That was her gift to me, and I didn't know I'd needed it.

When she died, Ambrose grew up in the same way — before Anaïs even arrived, before there was anything to be responsible for except the fact of her absence. I watched him lose his grief and find his steadiness and become an older sibling and when he got a younger one he was already practicing.

Ambrose learned how to take care of things from a girl named Zooey, including me, and now he passes it on.

My belief is that once she is three-and-a-half, which is six-and-a-half months away from today, a switch will flip and she will become wonderful, like Ambrose did.

Part of me hopes she stays this fierce forever.

the human is beautiful

All of this adds up to my whole life. I have several jobs and a 62-year-old husband and a novel in progress and opinions about almost everything and self-set deadlines flying past. And I have a love of you, specifically, for still being here. It is a lot. I would not trade it.

Also: I'm looking for work, if you've got any. Content writing, editing, strategy, basically anything with words I'm very good with. If you have need, or know somebody who does, let me know.

Otherwise stay frosty and remember that eventually we all grow up and become citizens, even puppies with every worm.

Even you and me.