again everything just bewilders me, etc., repeat

Why didn't humans, like the frogs and salamanders, develop more ways to cope?

The same essential species, but each adjusted to excel in a specific way which enables life processes. A clutch of transparent spawn clinging to the underside of a leaf. Pouches on either flank, pulsating with tadpoles. A frothy lair under the desert sand, sitting in wait for months or years. Poison ribs that push through the skin, heal, push through again, heal. Communication reduced and simplified to the loudest chirrup or the most elegant arm-wave.

My cats wake me up early.

One of them might die; they will both die someday. I will die someday. If he dies, I say, I can help more cats that need love. I have so much. I need to stop letting this consume me. "If I had all the money," I think, with clownishness that I feebly use to try and cover up for a notion so ripe and wrinkled that it makes me hate myself to know I think it so automatically -- if I had all the money! I could fix things. I could fix so many things. I fix things now. There will never not be things to fix.

Tools, tadpoles. Instead of evolving pertinent physical ways to cope with survival all I've got is this brain and these thumbs and these tools this human unrest; this eternal whisper of "fix, fix, fix."

People I haven't seen in awhile ask me how I'm doing; it's different than being asked the same question by someone you talk to frequently. You're forced to assess in broader terms. Invariably, I answer truthfully, "I'm great, I'm really great." Considering my placement in a vast, nebulous timeline is a comfort.

I can take a bath. I can take a blade and make my shins smoother than taut doeskin.

I can spend time with friends whose voices hit my ears like those of family members, such familiar tones, I can conjure up in abstractness with no words attached. Disembodied flute, pitch, and lilt; the memory of sound pairing this information certainly somewhere where it stores music, a web of vaguely defined memory and association. File under "brother/sister." React accordingly.

My friend leaves an imprint of his mammal warmth on the couch; I sit down on it and it's such a shock, this residual energy. I realize it's the closest I've felt to really touching another person in a long time and something cracks, like an eggshell, in the hollow where throat meets trunk and trickles strange pain down my ribs. I don't know if this is being lonely; I don't know if I'm allowed to be lonely.