Existentialism: A Dead Cat
There is little to contextualise what I want to account here, so I will head straight into it.
Around a week ago, I moved into my new place. The city is the same but the area is different.. More Residential. Whereas the city centre is the place to see dogs, being walked up and down the promenade all day, I now live where there are cats. Particularly, the kind that sunbathe.
Three days ago, I met a local legend in passing. People were crowded around him (I think it’s a he), giving a lot of fuss and attention. A cat. As a slight stranger to this part of town, I thought “I’ll sit down with him next time I walk by and there’s less people.”
That night, I dream. Something apocalyptic. The whole description doesn’t matter so much here, what counts is that there was a group of us in a foreign country and planning our journey to the nearest city whilst running off of no food. We’re all growing restless from hunger, including the cat and dog we have with us for dream-knows-what reason. So, we’re plotting on the physical map to some city that probably didn’t exist when we heard a yelp from a few metres away. The cat. She (I think it’s a he) had just been sitting there, no trouble. The dog had bitten her. A bite to the side that he went in for a second time on and we had to pull him away. It was just a bite, but it had an ominous feeling to it - a heavy weight of killer instinct. You might know this feeling, when something in a dream holds impact and emotion but you don’t understand entirely why. Or, you may have experienced something similar when you know someone in the dream is depicting someone in your real life but they’ve got the wrong face.
I’d never had this dream before. I’d never dreamt of a dog attacking a cat, at least that I can remember.
The next morning I woke. I got up. I had breakfast, brushed my teeth and checked my phone. A girl I went on a date with once (twice) had posted to her Instagram story. There’s a picture of a familiar cat and I remembered she had lived on that road I saw the sunbather the day prior. The caption to her story read along the lines:
“[This beloved cat of the street] was killed by a greyhound last night.”
I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m not saying I am involved. But in times like these, I can’t help but question the universe. What layer of existence aren’t we seeing? To me it seems there is a good chance of one. Even to the most logistical, I question, is there not the chance that a whole realm of our universe evolved to be imperceptible to that which would hunt it (which we still do)? It is a strange feeling to claim logic and the “supernatural” or “spiritual” (our words for the unseen and indeterminable) as being intellectually compatible, but this is a direction I have been driven in the last year. Logic once led me to a cold, empty death. Now, it leads me to an eternal soul. I won’t claim that the end is any more colourful, but it is certainly hopeful.