
The sun has risen again. My panic crows once,
twice, filling my throat. I open my laptop but not my mouth.
The Vedic astrologer says she does not wish
to waste any of my valuable time.
I wonder if I have any clean underwear. The cat
stalks my hand, falls on her side, nibbles my third finger.
My rising constellation: Ashlesha,
represented by a serpent.
In Vedic interpretation, Ashlesha is a difficult constellation
to deal with, the astrologer warns.
You should not concern yourself with mundane
marriage anymore. Seek only the Divine. All other
kinds of bonds cause suffering for Ashlesha.
I know at once that she has not recently wiped the bottom
of a chatty bond with diarrhea, or walked a pair of
aging bonds through the snow, or ordered a gift certificate
online for a devoted maternal bond.
Your 7th lord Saturn is debilitated in the rasi and navamsa,
indicating that having a partner is going to lead to more
negativity for you, than not having a partner.
The cat yawns. The sun picks itself up, excuses itself,
moves several houses away from mine. My panic would
crow all day, if I did not shut it up, swallow it each morning.
Instead, it scratches and scratches until my belly lights on fire.
It’s a blessing to not have to carry that burden or responsibility in life.
You feel alone, only because you are keeping your head at a petty place.
I skim the rest of the reading, will return to it in three months. For now
the house I must find a way to leave is silent, as it is three-quarters of the time.
Sometimes, the cat’s green-gold eyes follow something along the floor
into the next room. If I have let a serpent loose, I want her to kill it. I can
clean up a snake’s mess more easily than I can comprehend detachment
and how to embroider nothingness and I-don’t-care into the patchwork
of bedraggled love and life that is all I have of this time, of the tiny, once-innocent
word me that never meant to be petty, never meant to want more.
Detachment. I have ordered that drink, stomached enough of it, seen its bloodshot
aftereffects in your eyes. I know its taste but still I call out through closed lips,
another innocent word:
you.

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