No, not that Leonard… actually, even though Leonard the man is fiercely sexy. My kind of sexy. Naked hearted sexy, and lyrical with it, I never really dreamed of being Leonard’s lover. What I longed for most was to be Leonard’s daughter, but that’s another post.

Waking up with Leonard The Dog. The woman and cat become woman, cat and dog. And I would have put money on not having had expectations that Leonard was going to release me from my heavy heart. But somewhere, deep down inside, some fragment of Caroline must have been waiting for a miracle. And I know this because the disappointment in my mind, body, heart and soul, has nearly buried me these last days. Waking up with Leonard and finding I am still here in the fields of depression.

Yep, that God above, is sure as hell a joker. And as a self proclaimed queen of welcome, I find myself welcoming Leonard and having to welcome myself as I am. Again. In the heaviest of heavy. A symphony of heavy tones and overtones, pulsing and beating. My fingernails are heavy. And every hair on my head. My bones are rocks and my organs are bags of sand. It never ceases to amaze me how breath keeps being pulled in and pushed out through these defeated lungs. And, I guess that’s not a bad bit of symbolic reflection, because there is life in all that heavy. There always has been. I’m alive in there. Especially when I stop waiting and fighting to be released from my own precious self. Especially when I can manage that.

Waking up with Leonard is still waking up with me. Of course I knew that, and I’m a little bit thrown by the truth of my disappointment. Maybe the shadow of being a queen of welcome, is that sometimes I can hide the very sharpest edges of my hopelessness and rage, in the poetry of welcome. There are parts of being lifelong depressed that just don’t lend themselves to lyricism, even in my book. Even in the realms of ravaged beauty. Not even in the daily business of living with defeat.

So, waking up with Leonard has made me laugh and groan. He wakes up early and needs to go outside. Of course I take him. And then he wants to celebrate the new day by playing with dog chews, cushions and my hair. He’s teaching me to play with him and not make myself wrong for lumbering. Oh God, I think it’s going to take me the rest of my life to forgive myself for lumbering. Lumbering is the currency, the embodied language of my depressed. It is heavy and laboured and slow and I am grateful to have discovered in the landscape of lumbering that the line between groaning and laughing, is fine.

I’ve been explaining all this to Leonard as I lumber about, teaching him his beautiful name and how much fun it is to run after a tennis ball and then kill it. He listens to me with great attention and then rolls over and goes to sleep. Yesterday he ate a poem before his nap.