You Don’t Know Me Anymore
Maybe you never did
I recently woke up from a nap and realised I’d become a cat.
“Strange”, you might say. “You don’t look like a cat.”
And that’s true.
Unlike Gregor Samsa, who finds himself transformed into a giant insect in Kafka’s famous tale, my physical appearance has hardly altered at all during the course of my own metamorphosis.
I haven’t grown fur all over my body. Nor do I have paws or claws or a slinky tail. I haven’t developed prescience or even particularly acute hearing. And I have definitely not acquired a taste for raw mouse.
It’s more subtle than any of that.
And yet, I can declare with absolute confidence that my transformation is no less complete for the absence of physical changes.
At the end of the day, who’s to say what I am, except me?
And I tell you, my inner experience of myself is such that I feel as if I am indeed fully furred and have a slinky tail swishing behind me as I pad softly through my days and nights with the hyper-awakened senses of a hunter.
Also, in a very real way, everything I eat now has to it something of the quality of raw mouse-meat fresh from the kill.
You’re probably wondering why this happened to me and when it all began?
I can’t say for certain.
If I had to give an answer, I’d say that my transformation arrived without cause, and happened so very gradually as to have been almost imperceptible until it was complete. Or, looked at another way, perhaps I’ve simply always been a cat, but just didn’t notice until recently.
I could tell you when I first started napping a lot in the day and spending much of the night awake, prowling through the silver moonlight. But this wouldn’t reveal anything truly significant about the transformation I have undergone.
In any case, my interest in the whys and the wherefores of my condition grows as thin as winter-starved prey. Causes really don’t concern me anymore. And the past is only dust on my paws.
I am what I am. And that is enough.
Needless to say, no-one around me has yet perceived what I have become, although I do nothing to conceal it.
There have started to be a few small signs that some of my closest people are beginning to notice, peripherally, that I am different. My best friend recently commented on my being more relaxed and aloof of late. And a couple of other friends have found themselves offering me glasses of milk when I visit them.
But there has been nothing more than that in the way of recognition. And that’s fine. Who could really be expected to divine the unique transformation I have undergone?
For my part, I’ve been resisting the urge to cuddle up to people on the sofa and to try to induce them to stroke my belly. It would only create misunderstanding.
But I refuse to live any longer under a false persona. Pride now demands that I disclose the fact that I am, in my essential being, a cat.
There was a time when I wouldn’t have been able to risk placing my singular condition into the distorting lens of a worldview that has no place for it. And I would easily have admitted that I fear nothing more deeply than being held in incomprehension by those I love.
In such ways I was, until well into the advanced stages of my transformation, vulnerable to dissociation within the hall of mirrors of other people’s realities.
But all of that angst seems like a tedious lunacy now.
Indeed, I could say that it is precisely the loss or abandonment of concern for the dreamlike realities of others that is the defining difference between what I was and what I am now become.
It was immediately after such concern had disappeared completely that I woke up from a particularly delicious nap in the certain knowledge of being a cat.
I’m happy to say that my sense of myself is now a sinuous whole, essentially unaffected by how anyone else might perceive me.
Yes, I am what I am. And that is enough.
Inside, I feel deliciously full and at peace with myself, as if there’s a river of delectable honey flowing continuously in my heart.
Consequently, it’s totally obvious to me that to remain entirely comfortable at all times and in every situation is the only sensible course of action. I am able to prioritise this to a level I would previously have considered pathological, and I use no small measure of spontaneously arising stealth to bypass anything which might disrupt my flowing ease.
In this way, choice has become entirely subordinated to felicity. This enables me to move through the world as nonchalantly as the wind.
Almost, now, there are only stars by night and the sun by day, beneath which a fluid, dreamlike landscape rises up beneath my softly stepping feet and pours around me in cool, pellucid forms noticeable only insofar as they are either food or threat.
In this new world, it’s enough for me to follow the rhythms of movement and rest, hunger and satisfaction, light and shade. I have absolutely no interest in achieving or attaining anything above or beyond the immediacies of food, shelter, and the expansive leisure to move or sleep exactly as the mood takes me. All my relaxed alertness is attuned only to securing and deeply enjoying whichever of these primitive luxuries most attracts me from moment to moment.
Having no speculative desires with which to anchor myself into any possible future, the world is resolved into an utter simplicity in the form of the present moment.
I am entirely contained. You could transport me anywhere at any time and nothing of me would be left behind. I thus have no fear of death. I am, therefore, immortal, or as close as a flesh-and-blood cat can be to that abstract state.
But it’s very strange to describe in words and ideas the soft aurora of my inner experience. None of what I’ve written here really means anything to me anymore, despite my still being able to formulate the sentences.
It’s as if I were writing calligraphy with my tail in sand, in a language that no longer exists, perhaps never existed.
And so I’ll stop now, and go outside.
If you wish to find me, I may be curled up in a ball in the long grass purring happily, listening to the beating of my heart as the dusk deepens and the light softly changes and the stars emerge from their hiding places to hunt each other through the night sky.
Or maybe I won’t.
In any case, soon, very soon, these clumsy human words and all their clumsy human meanings will fall away from me entirely, like the setting sun, and disappear behind the thousand ephemeral veils of my inscrutable feline mind.
And nothing will be lost. Nothing at all.
Meow.
