Cosmic Shittiness

I never wanted this blog to be The Blog of Pain; there are numerous such blogs all over the place--just total downer blogs full of total downer entries, one after the other, full of constant bitching and moaning and perpetual oh-woe-is-me-ness.

And I don't want this blog to be that; I want this blog, mostly, to be irreverent, a little quirky, and wildly incongruous--kind of the way my brain works.

But this time, tonight, this entry is going to be about Cosmic Shittiness. Because that's what I'm thinking about, right now, this moment.

I got a call from my neighbors asking for off-and-on cat-sitting, on no real identifiable schedule; we do this for one another, and it's convenient. Living here, in this 8-plex in South Minneapolis has sort of been like a more-functional Peyton Place or Tales of the City, with a Midwestern twist.

Anyway.

My neighbor, who owns said cat, is 28 or so; her boyfriend, also the building's caretaker, is my age, or a bit older. He knocked on my door tonight to follow up on the cat-sitting request, and to explain why it's off-and-on.

My neighbor, the 28 year old, has cancer. All over her body. Her shoulder blade and some other places, but I can't remember what he said.

She'd had it before last Spring, in her sinus, and was operated on, successfully. They took it out, she recovered, life went on. Recently, they went to Mexico, to Ixtapa, and I cat-sat then. They came back tan.

I'll cat-sit again, as often as they need.

The caretaker stood in my doorway, filling me in, explaining it all in scientific details, the options, the chemo. They'd be going to Mayo and some other places. They need to be aggressive, he said. They need to act fast. She's young. It's a rare kind of cancer, and sometimes, those are the worst. She can live with it, for a while. But as usual, no one knows for how long.

No one knows.

And I listened and then he had to get back to his cooking and I closed the door and stood over my sink of unfinished dishes and just said, over and over, to no one, to the universe, to the consistently-unfair cosmos, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

She's smart and laughs loud and is a great, thoughtful neighbor and an all-around kind person. And I'm so angry, because it's so...unfair. But then, I don't really know what would make something like this fair. Maybe if she were 60 years older than she is now and had already done the things she told me she'd planned for herself, for this life of hers, like having children.

I have been given this news, the reason for the cat-sitting, and I don't want to have to know. But I can't "un-know" this. Too late.

Now it's a fact. My neighbor, a young woman, with cancer. Unknowable.

And I will watch her cat.