Pussycat Mountain

Pussycat...pussycat…laying on the length of my side. I can feel your nails slowly poke through my shirt and your purring echo on my ribs. Nothing delights my heart more then being chosen for attention…I wanted to say love but I know you do not love me. You sit so close watching me type tempted to pounce on the fingers that poke and jump across the keyboard…I hope you do just that.
Life is here tonight. Living is within me.
How silly that I stop typing to let you smell the screen…tail covering a third of my words. Words written about you.
Tight little package curled at the end of this air mattress looking out into the night. I am alive tonight with your presence. What I mean to write is that I am even more alive now because you are hanging on the edge, and if you claw through the blanket in fear or joy we will both get wet.
Wet? Yes. It is raining outside tonight and the embers from the fire are still glowing. I can see the outline of your ears in front of the fire. I think you are licking your paw. The floor is wet and neither you or I would enjoy the cold night if something happened to this mattress. I don’t even know where you came from. Why are you here with me tonight? So tiny and new. White chest and brown ears contesting the black running up your tail.
The rain is beating against the roof calmly like a Jehovah’s Witness. Thump da da dun da dun thump. I feel like I am underwater listening to muted bubbles.
An orange ball of light is trying to burn through curtains of black and I can’t believe the fire is fighting so hard.
I am so happy out here. Far far far far from roads and electricity. Away from city lights and noise. No mail comes here. No cops drive by. If these were my last words and my body turned cold as I lay dead it would be many moons before someone came. A copperhead hiding under the rocks could send me into a fevered dream and into the void or a brown bear hungry from the winter following the scent of not too carefully sealed food only to find the warm delicacy of my body. How that pleases me.
 I feel the incongruence of writing on my laptop about the joy of being out. I know it makes as much sense as a doctor complaining about science permeating medicine.
This is the dichotomy of life.
You have this everyday. Look at it and relish the absurdity of living.
Wanting something and having something else.
I am losing this feeling of “real” to the desire to write about a lesson.
I am not anyone’s teacher. Or leader. Or role model.
I am just Markus Shane Davis.
Tonight I know only these things:
I am Mother Nature’s son
I carry a rifle as I walk through the woods
I hunt nothing but will shoot what is needed
I crave a cold, alcoholic beverage
Rain on fallen leaves sounds like breaking glass in another room
Bucks rub the bark of the saplings in these woods and smell like an exotic dish rotting in the trash can
Cats like body heat and will play with empty gun shells on the ground for about an hour
Trees tell me things that no person can
I miss love, even if it's only for a few minutes
Time goes by slowly in the night when you can’t sleep
I want to kiss that scholarly little girl who reads so much
A fire warms only one part of your body at a time
Coyotes yelp and play like young boys
I would be happy to die here in the wild
The man I thought I was is slowly fading into memory
Oak leaves in winter are the color of freshly baked bread
I am a fool

I want to write more but longing drums on my heart as steady as the rain outside. 
Some days later the morning breaks again on me and this note. I can’t rectify within my mind why I brought a laptop out into the mountain wilds. The battery is dying and the only thing I can use to charge it is the warm sun and deer meat. I hope it dies so I can ignore it and stop trying to write…it is robbing me of the precious moments here in the oaks and spruce. I feel silly sitting here in the dirt with a morning cigarette hanging out of my mouth typing with coils of wood smoke wrapping around my head as if I was Gandalf the Grey whittling ships in the air. This kitty is feral but too young to be dangerous. It bites my fingers when I play with it but not in a way that makes me laugh but recoil in horror at the red beads shining on my hands. I heard a plane yesterday somewhere off in the distance but the trees and mountaintops hid it from my view. I was crossing a field following the crushed, dry wheat when I heard it. And not two minutes later I came upon the semi-crop circle the deer had made when they all slept here the night before. The size of the depression belied the enormous number of them…maybe fifteen or twenty. I sat down in their bedding and looked up at the sky. The pistol I borrowed from my cousin poked me in the ass forcing me to lie down to enjoy the view. To say it was silent would be a gross understatement since it was still all over the world. Not a tree branch scraped or a stalk of wheat cracked…until I broke one off and placed it in my mouth like a good Huckleberry Finn.
I like sitting on big mossy stones in the woods with the rifle leaning against the edge. I can stare out at the valleys through the trees for hours and hours.
I will miss this immeasurably when it is time to fly back home.