I'm just coping in disguise

While my soup warms on the stove, people outside are dying

This Substack reached an incredible milestone over the weekend, and I wanted to formally welcome all my new subscribers who came over from Pittsburgh’s Public Source. I implore you that local journalism, critical thinking and empathy combined is our most important cocktail in this horrendous political climate. My overwhelm of the horrors both here and abroad have made me avoidant of my writing routine this month, so consider this piece a warm-up exercise to break in the new year.

If my writing resonates with you, please consider subscribing, sharing or liking this piece to help me appease the algorithm gods <3

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There is a cat in my basement who isn’t mine, but doesn’t necessarily belong to anyone else. Blacker than compressed charcoal with eyes as big as the dinner plates he hoped to eat, I fed him casually for a couple of weeks before he started crossing the street to meet me at my door step. I assumed I was just his favorite lunch date until I saw his soft tracks in the snow one morning ascending my front stairs, stopping just before my welcome mat.

A winter storm was predicted to hit my city, the biggest snowfall Western Pennsylvania would see in ten years. With my bathroom cabinet already stocked with toilet paper and my refrigerator a full carton of eggs, I worried equally about this cat’s life and the repercussions of accidentally stealing him from someone else.

I remembered a time when my sister was little where she found a nest of baby bunnies in our backyard, tucked gently under a rhododendron bush. She checked on them joyfully everyday for a week until one afternoon she found them beheaded and bloody, her scream rattling the neighbors’ windows. I don’t remember burying them anywhere except deep in our memory, replaced with a grievous understanding of natural selection.

The bowl now left empty

It was -4 the night before the storm when the cat greeted me upon returning from an out-of-town weekend. While unloading bags and boxes, he followed me through the gate into my backyard, looking up at me with his bright eyes. Rather than betray the trust he showed in me, I opened the side door and invited him inside, imagining my lawyer’s strongest defense: Offering him free will, your honor, makes the defendant not guilty of kidnapping charges.

This midwest storm brought 11 inches of snow and lockdown scenes reminiscent of the coronavirus: while my soup warmed on the stove, people outside were dying. Like 2020, Minneapolis is in the news again; a fascist contagion manifesting in the forms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, murdering civilians in the same city where George Floyd died under a policeman’s knee.

The nauseous feeling of my personal comfort amid injustice has returned six years late; watching from my window the fear radiating outside in place of the sunlight we so desperately need. My world is one where state senators need to be convinced to defund homeland security while the president is preoccupied with annexing Greenland; where my tax dollars continue to fund a genocide in Gaza and an Iranian regime slays its own people.

Ripley and Jones <3

My new caretaking responsibilities required me to spend more time in my unfinished basement than I otherwise would. I brought a lamp and rug downstairs to make my new guest more comfortable, later adding a green, wool blanket from my attic and a $30 Walgreens heating pad. My evenings consisted of sitting crosslegged on a floor cushion with him in my lap, secluded from the world’s horrors in a room where cell service is spotty and wifi doesn’t quite reach. Descending into this safe space feels a lot like the end of Alien (1979), when the only survivors of an extraterrestrial attack are Sigourney Weaver and her orange cat Jones asleep in an oxygen chamber.

In a world so bleak, what I thought was a desperate attempt of heroism was actually just coping in disguise, an act both selfish and selfless in the same breath. A cat’s purr is considered by many a form of sound therapy, the vibrations carrying anti-inflammatory properties known to improve circulation and regulate the human nervous system. Sitting in my lap, this abandoned cat’s purr is a primordial, sacred Om, relaxing my eyelids closed while I run my fingertips across his fur, counting every little vertebrae of his spine. These moments became meditation, surrounded by a cement soundscape of only furnace clicks and faucet drips.

Feature Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash