A fox and a magpie

Viv sets her coffee and plate of toast down on the table and sits in her watching chair. She gazes down at the street and spots the fox immediately: inert on its side, between two cars, right outside her building. She wills herself to believe it’s just sleeping, but she takes in the subtly absurd tilt of its neck and knows otherwise. Ignoring that cruel angle, it could look peaceful. Perfect, even in death. Viv’s heart breaks for the thousandth time and she longs to run down and shift its head. Tears rally themselves, reach critical mass. Seeking respite from the scene Viv closes her eyes. It doesn’t help though, so after a minute or so she opens them, weary. Ambushed like this, she hasn't been quick enough to stop the thoughts from coming – they feast and dart and nibble: the lapse in intuition that had seen it step into the road at the wrong time, the shock of the impact and the damage. Had its thoughts been on arriving home, to its mate? Had its foxy daydreaming killed it? She thinks (she can't stop, it's like picking a scab) about its suffering, calling out to its family as it was fading from life.

The breath chokes up in her and the crowd of tears release, a surge. This is what it is to be overly empathetic, a highly sensitive person. To be, perhaps, neurodivergent in some way. Whatever she is, whatever she has, it's not something she can control. The emotions it throws up are like objects lifted in a gale, wildly flying about; not in control of themselves or their destiny, or of the havoc they wreak. Things rendered uncontrollable, things rendered dangerous. She pairs words with this image and they come easily: autistic rage. She pictures the objects crashing to the ground as the wind drops, how useless and bereft and out of place they feel, deposited - how alone, how desolate, how inherently wrong. Someone might take them back to where they ostensibly belong, with a scolding - or they might just be thrown away, impotent to protest, put out on the street like rubbish. She won't let that happen to her. She will stay out of the gales, refuse to put herself at their mercy and be blown across the sky this way and that, like an errant plastic bag or a discarded newspaper. She won't let her volcanic rage rise, she won't put herself under the circumstances again that cause it to happen. In this way she will protect herself, and she will protect others. She closes her eyes, and pushes the memories of Sebastian away. She has put herself first, so be it. Leaving him had been an act of love, she reassures herself, though something niggles at her. She’s never really sure which are her own thoughts, judgements, opinions, and which are those of her family, her peers. That at least will fade now, she thinks, with this self-imposed severing from influence and opinion.

Viv closes her eyes again, intending to say a sort of prayer for the little fox (she's sure it's a he) but with the darkness comes a visceral sort of flashback, an inhabiting of him in the moments before death - she feels the hard concrete on her tongue, sees the sky through the leaves and branches of the nearby tree from a prone, unnatural angle. She feels grief well up inside her. Hers for him, or his own? Whatever, it threatens to engulf her. Her eyes fly open and cast about desperately for something to distract her thoughts, which, she knows, could easily now spiral even further and lead her into a panic attack - that tempting, indulgent deluge of sadness, of hopelessness.

She sees a single magpie, hopping along the pavement, and rests her gaze on it. An inauspicious day indeed, she thinks. These omens, these signs from nature, they mustn’t be ignored. She feels the vapours of dread, curling up from the fear that nestles deep in the pit of her stomach. Nodding solemnly, she watches it. It’s unaware of her; unaware even of the dead fox not two metres away from it. She speaks the words you are supposed to. Though iterated only quietly, they echo a little in the still empty room. 

'Good morning Mr Magpie, and how is your lady wife today?'

The phrase sounds funny though, somehow, so for good measure and just in case, she taps the table rapidly, nine times. And then another nine. Another. And another. The first three have cancelled each other out. The fourth sates her yen for superstition-driven action. She can't explain the tapping thing - even to herself - the numbers and how it all works, what compels her and why. It's like one of those seemingly non-sensical, magical equations scrawled across a chalk board by some mathematics genius. It's like sacred geometry, quantum physics – baffling, though you know that there's sense in it somewhere, if you could just work it out, if you could just see it. She's cross with herself for continuing with this nonsense, but still it compels her, in difficult moments. Who is this it, or what is this it, that has her in its grip, that draws her in, she wonders now. Part of herself? Something outside herself? She knows only that she mustn't disobey it. And that sometimes it's louder and sometimes, quieter. Sometimes, it even goes elsewhere, is absent from her. But it always comes back.

Viv starts to shifts the angle of her body on the chair, away from the Outside, but her eyes stick on the bird, wanting to give it sufficient respect lest she cause offence, lest she incur unknown but terrible woes. Watching the magpie hop hop hop then lift up into the air and away, she calls to her little friends: 

'Ignatia! Vladimir! Dominus!'

She hears the patter of tiny paws, at least one set. She won't go out today but that's fine - she doesn't go out most days now. She has built her world here, in this high up vantage point not far from the heart of the city. She couldn't have left London, whatever lies she has told her friends and family. It’s her city, her home. She hasn't been at ease with humans of late, but the fault doesn't lie with the city itself, she's become clear about that. She loves the intimacy of its dusk, falling pinkly, warmly on grey streets slick with rain; the masses of rushing people amongst whom she can feel safely anonymous; the smell of sea air that comes whooshing down into the city along the river on blustery, sunny days, disseminating itself, a bold and joyful character causing people to lift their heads and breathe in, hungry for it, grateful. She’s peaceful and content, perhaps for the first time in years. And she’s used to the not so good days, now, as well as the better ones. She rides them now, without the surfeit of emotion there had been in her before, when she had used to rail against them. This being human is a guest house, indeed, she thinks.

Turning inwards, closing her eys, Viv exhales, the dead fox still burned onto her retinas. She starts to count, out loud, in order to stop the thoughts that will otherwise come - the spirals, the loops, the traps. The whirling, swirling torture that her brain always tries to kick off in the wake of anything out of the ordinary, anything upsetting. She is wiser now though, more conscious of how it all works. More assertive, too - she corrals her brain, when she needs to.  She has learnt techniques to calm her overactive nervous system, to survive the world as it is, to limit the damage it does to her. Up here, in her refuge, she is giving her full attention to a healing process that had started even before she had decided to exit the world as she knew it, even before she had consciously realised the extent to which she needed to change her life. She has decided not, any more, to feel guilty, to be pulled this way and that by the vagaries of others' needs and wants and the sway of society and life or even by the big, heaving, charming, engulfing beast that is London and its rush rush rushing. Once the process is complete, she will re-emerge. Perhaps.

Viv lifts her gaze. Ignatia, the most intuitive of her little friends, is scampering towards her. She's so small, so light, that you can barely hear her footfall, the tap of her tiny nails. In the corner of the room Dominus and Vladimir, curled up in their makeshift den (an old pillow wrapped in a worn ragged cashmere jumper, tucked into a satsuma box), had lifted their heads slightly at the sound of their names, but are settling back down into sleep. She'd describe Ignatia, if she were asked, as joy formed into being, joy embodied, in a little four-legged, white-furred creature.

Ignatia, reaching Viv, hops onto her foot and climbs up her leg. With her little friend clinging on to the material of her soft wool tracksuit bottoms, Viv walks in to the kitchen to prepare a snack. Ignatia hops off. Viv continues, opens a cupboard at head height. Looking over at the tiny, mighty Ignatia crouched on the floor grooming herself, Viv feels in her chest, somewhere near where the physical heart is, the rush of love. It's a relatively new sensation to her and had surprised her by its intensity when she had first felt it. Heart opening, it's called, she now knows. The heart, she had read the other day, astounded, is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the human body, producing the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field of any of the body's organs. The heart's electrical field is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the electrical activity generated by the brain.

Some say it's the key to everything, the heart. Viv can believe it, now. She smiles at Ignatia, who has paused her grooming to look up at Viv.

'A dead fox.' Viv says to Ignatia, by way of explanation for her mood, which Ignatia always seems to be able to gauge. 'On the road.' She adds, gesturing with her head to Outside. Ignatia often gazes out there, which seems curious to Viv since she knows from reading up on rats that Ignatia's eyesight can't be good enough to see far, at least clearly. Ignatia makes a sympathic expression, but Viv knows that she is longing to go Outside and strongly suspects that she hates that Viv keeps her Inside. She feels like a jailor sometimes, but how to let them – her at least, the other two aren't bothered - go outside, out there into that madness, and remain safe?

Sure enough, after a minute or so, when Viv turns towards the coffee machine, Ignatia scampers off to the window to go and have a look for herself, even though she herself (she, more than anyone) already knows that she can't see that far.