I joke with my friends that my therapist’s primary goal is to get me to cry. Every session feels like a battle of wills: my therapist trying to get me to cry, and me refusing to cry (because I need to save up my feelings for when I really need them, or something). IT’S SO HEALTHY. (Obviously this is not what’s really happening, but it’s a funny joke that wins me forced smiles and eye rolls from said friends. But are they my friends? What do they say about me behind my back? I don’t care. But do I? What if they don’t actually like me and they’re just pretending to like me and my whole life is a giant, mean practical joke that just keeps going and going and going and going and going and going and going.). This battle of wills could be won so easily by my therapist, it’s not even funny: all she has to do is make me watch a video of an abandoned animal waiting to be adopted. It doesn’t even have to be the whole video – I’m likely to burst into tears in the first moments, like literally half a second in. It can be an animal that’s been abused, it can be an animal that was well loved but for whatever reason had to be given up, it can be a tiny baby animal, it can be an old crusty animal, it doesn’t matter: I will fucking cry and cry and cry at the thought of that animal living in a shelter, unloved and alone and heartbroken, even if that animal seems to be in good spirits and/or taking it all in stride.

Shit. It doesn’t even have to be a video. It can just be this story (goddammit, I’m crying right now, and you know that dog got adopted.).

I do also occasionally shed tears over people. Like: JonBenet Ramsey, for instance. But mostly, animals.

There are good reasons for this, of course. I’ve lived with animals most of my life and I’ve known for a long time that they’re paws down better than people. NO CONTEST. Y’all, for real, if you saw the way Yoshimi looks at me, you would understand why I’d rather spend time with him than you jerks. He is my husband son: my Ride or Die.

May I have this dance, m’lady?

And also, of course, at any point the people I love could abandon me – just decide they’ve had enough of my shit and drop me off on a corner the next town over and never look back. I mean – that probably won’t happen. But, you know: it could. We’re all so vulnerable. We’re all either clamping down or breaking down at virtually every moment. Right? Or is it just me?

Anyway.

I guess I’m in London. More on that later.