At the shelter, the cats are kept in glass-enclosed cases with just enough room to stand, walk a few steps, and eat; but strangers come on weekends to adopt them, take them to larger rooms and give them new names: James, Tabitha, Snowball, Molière, so you would never know how they began their lives, in abuse, grave hunger, and deprivation, or what strange turbulence lies coiled up inside their bodies, as they float to the top of warm stone walls or sleep in a lone patch of sun on the newlyweds’ bed.
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Inside myself and inside someone I care about is unrest. I keep imagining what it could be like to be in their shoes, to live with the unrest. Rather, I try to imagine but fail. Instead I feel my own feelings of what it is like to care from a distance and only be a passing witness to glimpses of someone else's life. I feel my own unrest.
Some days ago, I was reminded of-- no, rather, thoughts and memories that recur, recurred again. I read something someone had shared and was reminded of Syrian refugees I had had the fortune of meeting. Amid music, food and joy, I could not shake off the unrest imagining their lives, the deep insecurity, the homelessness. It's been over two years since that meeting and I have still not been able to shake it off.
Today, a sudden thump as if a fall took me out to the veranda. I suspected another cat may have come in. The cat I feed is a female and a male one keeps trying to encroach her space to let him have his way with her. I stepped out thinking just my voice and body would be enough but once out, I saw that as the cat I feed rested on the wall, a dog approached her. They were face to face, snouts and noses almost touching. Her body was tense and arched and the dog was rearing up. A second dog came running. All this within 2-3 seconds. There was no big tree she could climb up and I panicked imagining having to witness her being turned into blood and limbs. My planter with little stones was inside, having been taken in by me during yesterday's thunderstorm and running down would be time lost and my visitor, dead. The porcelain diffuser was still in the veranda and with it the remnants of a tealight. Instinctively, as if possessed, I banged the diffuser, ready to break it and throw shards near the dog. Distracted by the sound and then by the falling tealight, they retracted and leapt over the wall and disappeared. Cat and I looked at each other. I couldn't believe they had left so easily and she was alive. She probably couldn't believe it either. We looked at each other for some time and I wondered what else she had faced that was contained in her body. Do cats have memories like I do? Do they remember all the terrible things? Who will be there for her when I'm not? She seemed unconcerned and unthinking about these questions and will live as she has, without me appearing randomly in her life and disappearing as randomly one day. She will live with unrest, as will I, as will they. Eventually that soft patch of sun, more certain than everything else in life, will become the place of refuge for all of us-- human, tree, animal alike.
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