I once hoarded excuses like some people hoard cats. I indulged my dark defenses and let them prowl unfettered through my days until they had stained every fiber of my soul with the withering stench of squandered time.
Mistaking my pet concessions as something noble, I stroked them with firm hands of rectitude and fattened them on bowls of milky piety. When it seemed they were growing bored with my need for them and wanted their freedom, I let them lie in beds of soft oblation hoping they would stay true to me.
Without these daily but feeble mitigations, I would have to confess that I was lonely and a coward, balled up in the corner of everyone else's idea of contentment. For most of my adult life it was simply easier to clean up after litters of feral denials than to banish them from the house.
One day, worn to reason by the fetid swell of regret after my millionth cleansing, I walked out the front door of my home and of the life I had groomed and fed for thirty-two years and never returned.
Three years later, still bruised from a bias I am resolved to shed, I have begun to unravel the life I had long claimed as mine but once lived as a barn cat would; with little more than a passive acceptance that this is all there is and an insensible determination to outlast the elements.
And just for the record, I am a dog person.
