On Tuna and The meaning of Life

 

On Tuna and the Meaning of Life

— A cat, an existential crisis, and the strange ways we stay afloat

 

 

A couple of days ago I was going through an (almost) existential crisis. I have been thinking a lot about my past, my present worries and about broken dreams. And about my desire to burn the book I have been trying to write for such a long time that it began to feel unreal.

I wrote about it and published the essay here, on my blog. After that, inexplicably, I began to cry.  I felt relieved in a sense and also sad. I don’t know, so many feeling and so few words…

And then, a furry, ginger head appeared in my field of vision. It was Pitzi, the cat. “I can see you have a profound existential crisis. Is that the “pop” of a tuna can opening the sound I’m hearing?” his expression was telling me…and I smiled despite my dark mood.

He grounds me, my cat. Grips me when I hover dangerously over the precipice of depression and anxiety.  And brings me back to sanity. And then he looks at me with his orange, demon-like eyes as if asking: “Tuna catnip biscuits?” And it is really difficult for me to spiral into madness and despair when Pitzi is demanding my unwavering attention.

He doesn’t really care that I am going through an existential crisis. While I worry about curses and the universe punishing me for enjoying life, he drinks water from my glass if I leave it unattended.

While I am asking myself if I really wasted my life in a major way, he sleeps on my desk, between the keyboard and the monitor. If I try to move him or even pet him, he bites me.

While I am asking myself where I am going, he makes biscuits on the blanket he somehow dragged from my bed. And then he takes a nap.

What is going on in his head, I often ask myself. He dreams, that I know, because when he sleeps, his legs twitch and sometimes he cries.  

Does he have memories or is he anchored solely in the present?

Does he remember the time he was a baby and my husband found him near the trash bin outside our building, riddled with fleas and worms and sick with cat flu? Does he remember how we took him in, cared for him and loved him? Now, when I look at him sleeping on my lap, curled like a shrimp I wonder if he remembers any of it. I wonder, too, wheter his nightmares come from that forgotten past.

“Ginger cats are tough”, the vet told us back then. “He’ll survive. But they’re also mean bastards so I worry more if you’ll survive”. Well, he did. We, too.

And now, when he runs like a deranged being zooming through the house and scratches the insides of cardboard boxes like crazy, he makes me forget about life’s real or imaginary disasters.

He doesn’t judge me. He doesn’t tell me my poems are lame, that my writing sucks, that I am a bad parent. He doesn’t scold me when I forgot he likes a certain brand of canned tuna.  He just stares at me with his oval, a bit oblique eyes as if he wants to say:” Come on, life is not so bad, what about those chicken-cheese snacks I like?”. And then he goes to fetch me his multicolored ball to throw it for him.

And his silence speaks to my soul more than a thousand words do.