Do you ever want to just be outrageous?
To choose the wide-brimmed magenta hat, to publish your poetry, to get the moon tattooed inside your wrist, to let your inside out with a shout?
Do you ever wonder if this is why you admire cats?
We admire cats for as many reasons as we dream: to stretch beyond the ends of our short fingers, to remember that our blood runs wild, to imagine the day when we loll in the sun with no shame.
I’m convinced that one of cats’ greatest achievements is their ability to bear our unlived light.
One of CAT’s greatest aspirations is to bounce us back to ourselves like a mirror.
A mashed potato of a mirror, to be sure. CAT is as sleek and fragile as an eighteen-wheeler filled with turkey jerky. More olive loaf than pixie (hold the olives, also eat the pixie), CAT is gravitational force, gratuitous jelly, a four-legged delicatessen with no desire to be delicate.
Perhaps this is because CAT knows life is brittle.
Plump berry though she may be, CAT was a cat unchosen. There is little adoptive appetite for cats with ISSUES, and cat took up shelf space for too long. The public shelter system is filled with good people, selfless people, our kind of people. But it is also filled, period. Go unchosen long enough, and you will go nowhere fast, if you’re lucky.
CAT was more than lucky.
CAT was a loaf of promise. (Loaf of Promise is also CAT2 and CAT3’s Pixies’ tribute band.)
CAT caught a ride to Tabby’s Place, that euphoric cafeteria just outrageous enough to keep making promises, and to make “keeping promises” our special of the day.
Every day.
Peeled off the Too Late List, CAT was right on time and right at home. We slapped her between wry slices of Unconditional and Irrevocable, and slathered on the mercy-mustard of Everything We Have Is Yours.
The feast has been ours.
We’re so promise-pickled here, we sometimes forget that CAT has ISSUES.
CAT forgets nothing.
Having walked the edge of the abyss, CAT regrets not one feat of freedom, not one flight of delight.
When you have come close to being broken, you hold your wholeness like a diamond to the sun. You want every facet to fling rainbows in all directions, perchance to light a grey face.
You empty all the bowls, unafraid that this is the final fish mush. You empty all your best ideas onto today’s page, unworried that tomorrow will run dry. You empty yourself of being full of yourself, which, after all, is the reason humans trip over ourselves.
CAT only trips for topics like turkey jerky. And kisses atop the head. And the contingency of the cosmos.
And humanity’s dreams.
We ladle a lot on cats. You know this, which is why you’re here. We celebrate their courage to live honestly. We outsource our outrageousness and grate our risky zest all over them. We love them for living as though they can count on love, even if they are wild or mild or crisp around the edges.
We want to be children of the promise.
We pile so many secrets in their whiskered wheelbarrows, it’s a wonder they can walk at all.
But they run.
They live.
This is a great mystery. A creature who lives twenty years, dependent on apex predators for grace and bologna, should tremble every hour. There is nothing inevitable about their lives, no cosmic guarantee.
But here they stand, shining across the sky, a hundred aurora borealises demanding beef and dominion. CAT has seen enough uncertainty to know that this is the day, and CAT is the cat, and we are all too fragile not to pluck every promise and devour every dream.
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll deliver semis of celebration.
We’ll praise the free, the cats and each another and our shy, shining selves.
We’ll live this day as an improbable, outrageous gift. And if we get another one tomorrow, we’ll wear the magenta hat and send the letter and bespangle ourselves like J-Lo for a grocery run.
We’ll fill the eighteen-wheeler with love.
We have promises to keep.