Underwater cat
Sometimes I’m like a starfish that can’t find its way home. A deep blue surrounds every movement, undertow, and currents competing with one another against the flow of the water and the rise and fall of the tides. Underfoot are sand and pebbles and fish and corals, but they’re all too far down to be able to touch with my toes. Otherwise, I’d be able to stand here in the midst of the waves and allow their salty brine to wash over me. So, instead, I float. I exist. I wait for a sign, an ivory pinprick of a star, or a nightlight to tell me where I’m going.
Other times, I’m a cat swimming to the surface of the grand expanse of the ocean. With open eyes, I’m looking up to where the sunbeams through the top of the ripples, paddling my way to the warmth with the kind of purpose you’d expect from an underwater cat. I don’t know what’s above, or what will appear when I emerge from beneath other than hopefully something familiar, but what I do know is that I have to get there as quickly as possible. As fast as possible. Or my lungs and my brain and my heart all together won’t be able to stop me from breathing in the crystalline liquid of the sea.
When I’m a starfish, I want to be a cat, and when I’m a cat, I want to be a starfish. And when I’m neither a cat nor a starfish, as occasionally the case may be, I am empty as a lonely vessel floating, abandoned, out to sea.
The vessel is sometimes a barge, big and broad and overwhelming. Other times, the vessel is a sailboat just following the wind. It doesn’t matter which of the two—or the many types of boats in between—I am, because they do not have a captain and are at the mercy of the rocky shorelines and the hollow beyond. When my mind is the vessel, occasionally it takes on water and sinks slowly to the bottom of the sea. Those are the days when I find myself wandering in the blankness, waiting to become a starfish or a cat, drenched in the perpetual nothingness of the environment.
However, despite feeling like I’ll be stuck forever in the vacant twirling of tides and currents, I always become either a starfish or a cat before making my way home. But even the very definition of home can mean different things for a starfish versus a cat. And maybe, in some ways, I have multiple homes that exist inside my mind, made up of different rooms with different views when I look out the window. Some are warm and sunny, some are gray and snowy, and some have maritime weather that changes with every passing hour. But all can be considered a home, depending on the circumstances.
Sometimes I’m like a starfish that can’t find its way home. Other times, I’m a cat swimming to the surface of the grand expanse of the ocean. When I’m a starfish, I want to be a cat, and when I’m a cat, I want to be a starfish. But starfish or cat, barge or sailboat, in my head there is a swirling stream of consciousness waiting to surge out the metaphorical window and into the sky. Then, it will be absorbed by clouds and rain down on the parched earth to nourish the atmosphere and fill the ocean for yet another floating starfish or underwater cat.
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