This is how Elka asks for dinner. She lifts her paws into your hands and looks at you and says with her eyes – I’m hungry. Please feed me. It is 6:02 pm and you are late.

The past few weeks, despite the parties and the fun on this blog, I’ve been heartbroken in 10,000 ways. Well maybe not quite 10,000. But at least 1,000. The light and the dark are two sides of the same coin. To combat the heartbrokenness, I’ve been having Elka sleep in bed next to me (though we carefully trained her to sleep in her donut bed on the floor next to our bed for over a year), between me and my husband, tucked in like a live stuffed animal who soothes me with her steady breathing, her sighs of contentment and her intermittent dreams where all her limbs shake and tremble trying to catch the imaginary neighborhood squirrel.

I just finished the audiobook of the poet Maggie Smith who talks about her disintegrating marriage – the dissolution which started (kind of) when the following poem went viral.

Good Bones 

BY MAGGIE SMITH

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.