We have acclimated, to the new apartment. I say acclimated and not adjusted, because I do not believe it is my nature and most certainly not in the cat's nature to adjust. to Adjust by definition is "To Alter or move (something) slightly in order to achieve the desired fit, appearance, or result." We do not need to alter anything to fit in the new apartment. I had no furniture, it was purchased to be a part of this new life. I had no home, I was subletting from a heinous wretch of a human with no morals that didn't come attach to dollars signs. There was no adjusting, only acclimation. It is now 9:30 am and I am sitting in my towel drinking coffee as the cat taunts birds out of the kitchen window, or I assume if you were to ask the birds they are taunting her. It is an intricate game she plays with the neighborhood birds, she can see just enough trees from the windows to follow the birds and the sun so she can lounge,taunt, and hunt at her leisure and with all the cares of any cat that came before or after her.
This new place still feels empty, the bed is made and the couches are vacuumed of cat hair twice a day, three times if I feel maniac so more often than not it is three times, and that's OK. It simply means I'm always ready for company. The expansive wall in my living room sits empty no book cases or chairs and no more boxes. The therapist believes I should "let the space be empty" she believes it will help me to expand my walls and open my world, stop trying to wall myself in. I believe she is trying to glue together pieces of a doll that don't belong together. It's cathartic and I like seeing her, like the conversation and believe she challenges my mind, I'll keep going back because at it's worst it's depressing and at it's best it's therapeutic, which I assume is why one goes to Therapy in the first place. It is not unlike why one writes, except that this situation after carefully choosing the words to write down and laying them so gently on the page, the page tells you what to rethink in the paragraph you just wrote. Having the therapist is like hving the little voice that tells you "not that sentence; at least not that sentence in that spot". The dependency of ourselves on the people in our lives is the hardest cage to break out of. We draw people in to surround us, flank us as if they are our very own army against the darkest parts of our own minds. They are not an army and they are cannot protect us from the parts of our mind we truly fear. The parts we need protecting from are the ones we travel down late at night, or early in the morning when we lay ourselves down to sleep, or first wake up and think about the previous days transgressions, or the current days hurdles. These parts of our mind are like the alleys in unsafe neighborhoods, lights flickering in darkness because the bulbs are going, shadows of trashcans illuminated in the crackling light to look like monster, real monsters coming up slowly behind you to take what is not theirs, no matter what it may be.
We build walls to stay safe, fill rooms with chairs and book cases or even more foolishly with people. People we believe can never hurt us, never leave us, never betray us. Instead all we have done is give the monsters in the alleyway a shorter distance to travel to take what they want.
We have not adjusted,we have simply acclimated.