I compared myself to my dog

She’s a bitch.
She doesn’t mind that I haven’t had a sheet on my mattress for over a year.
She doesn’t mind that the duvet has no cover.
She only minds a little bit that the duvet has torn and each day more and more duck
feathers float around the tiny bedroom and get stuck on the end of her nose.
She’s a black dog and the white feathers look silly on her.
She’s a long-haired black dog and her fur floats around the room and gathers in
corners like the brushwood in deserted cowboy towns.
Each day I look at the state of my bedroom and ask myself
“Should I do something about the state of this room?”
Each day I answer: “If my dog doesn’t mind, why should I? it’s our lair, It’s private.”
The white feathers and the black fur remind me of the sort of fairy tale where a
princess is locked into a room full of thousands of different bird feathers and if she
can’t sort them by the morning something terrible will happen.
Well, I know I’m not a princess but here I am in my room and the morning never
comes in my story and the Terrible Thing has already happened.
Time is stopped and the only movement is the breathing of my dog and the floating of
the feathers and fur.
In the middle of the night I put my hand out and find my dog and pat her and say
“Good girl .... good girl.” because once she lived in a home where she was tied up at
night and beaten in the morning if she had wet the floor - and now she needs to know
that she is ‘good’ just for being alive. Sometimes I say “You’re precious.”
Once I lay in a hospital bed in a psychiatric hospital and I longed to feel the breathing
of my dog under my hand and hear the sound of her sighing in the way that only dogs
do when they expel air and their whole bodies relax. It’s a comforting sound when
you are trying to hold onto life.
My daughter told me she is writing her autobiography: it is English homework.
She said that one part describes our living room floor. She won’t read it to me
but said that, if I want, I can send it to Dr. M, who is my psychiatrist.
I know that in this writing she mentions the empty tin of tuna that our dog raided
from the kitchen and has kept her company for a week or so. And other mess.
Each day I look at the state of the living room and ask myself:
“Should I do something about the state of this room?”
Each day I answer:“Yes, it is bad for my daughter to live like this. I must try to do something about it.”
Some days I try to tidy up. Most days I say to myself:
“It seems so unimportant compared to other things.”
I look at the cello on the floor, the keyboard on the chair, the microphone stand, the amplifier, the
bass guitar in the corner and the whole contents of my old, enormous studio crammed
into one end of the living room.
The only living things in this room are my dog and my daughter and her music.
I get home sometimes very tired.
I walk down the path and see and hear my daughter playing cello through the window.
She doesn’t stop when I walk in and I have to cuddle our dog to stop her barking.
She doesn’t stop when I walk in because she knows that listening to her playing is
another thing that keeps me alive. She doesn’t stop because it is her own world.
I look at her and wonder “How could this have happened? That something,
someone so profound and balanced could have grown out of this room? This home?”