Two Tigers

We're in our separate rooms. I'm lying on the bed, puny and pathetic, my cells distracted by some invader that's made me lurch when I get out of it. She's in her room, pacing in circles, bending gracefully over to pick up the toys she loves to mouth. Music wafts out and down the short hallway, sometimes eclipsed by her moans. She might be agitated. She might be vocalizing. I don't know. I tell myself that she's happy or at least content even as she's stimming away. I push away the thought that if I opened the door, she'd walk out and away. We're in our separate rooms, like tigers in cages. Her cage is purple and cream, lined with mermaids and music, swaying palms through glass, a padded door. Mine is my thoughts, the restless guilt, the never enough, the loneliness, the overwhelming fatigue, the whimper. I've told you about tigers before, way before there were tiger moms, way before when there was only Blake and what was burning bright. Here's that post from 2009.

I'm not Chinese. I've been leached, drained of my tiger-ness, like that old story about the little boy in the jungle, the tigers who spun so fast around the tree that they melted into butter that he put on his pancakes and devoured.