Last September a lady opossum (teets, a mother) sulked along the back shrubbery of Zac's yard as I stood in the foot path, watching. Bloody, baffled, she had been hit by a car or attacked by something much larger than she, and I came to her slow-creeping form, slowly. She had only last-life enough to fulfill some final instinct, dying somewhere quiet I guess. But she would often pause, and I would brood over her, talking at her, fancying that I comforted her in her death throes- though simultaneously wondering if she even existed, I'll admit that now. Eventually she dragged herself around the parameter of the yard, through the slat in the fence on the other side, and stopped there for good. I've maybe never dosed myself with such heavy-handed symbolism, and I think about it a lot; because at the time I needed it, and it did make me feel better about not being there with my mom. A guilt that is with me still, though it sounds idiotic to say.
But now, the rotting corpse of the same sort of beast lies just shy of that last possum's place. It's coarse curlies falling away and framing a skeleton holding it's pooling innards. Today I could think of almost nothing else but that skeleton and hide. My sweater looked just like that fur, itchy, rough, shedding on everything it touched. I realize now I will have to get rid of it. It all feels like a fucked joke. I don't know whose playing it, but it is someone who knows me well; because it is, to be honest, an almost daily struggle with my own childish morbidity to not google "decomposition one year later". I'm sure this happens to everyone, but nobody wants to talk about it, and if you're decent you won't. It's so pointless, but I don't know how to stop an obsession once it's formed. Like dreams for example: digging up graves, most likely influenced by Sopranos revisitation, but still, isn't the first time at all. I always naturally channeled my romanticism towards death, but it is disorienting to discover that when something really is that way, and it is that awful, it feels like the worst cuss word imaginable to say it, or see it.