Free Write #6
In my Creative Writing class, we’ve been instructed to do some free-writing each day as an exercise to calm the inner censor and to become more familiar with the simple act of writing. I write a lot anyway, but I have been enjoying the “free-writing” quite a bit. Free-writing is to write without any particular attachment to purpose and without any particular need to complete anything or even say anything. The instruction is simply to move the pen and not let it stop. This morning I wrote one that I thought I would share.
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Free Write #6
I awoke to the sound of the cat tearing around the apartment at tremendous speed, back and forth in a loop of some kind, stopping at either end of the circuit to look around herself for prey or for chase or a friend. She flips a small, brown, cloth constructed toy into the air, the closest she’s ever come to confronting a real mouse. Her mouse doesn’t move or run but falls dead to the floor. Maggie (the cat) bats the mouse, either to encourage sport or to assure that the mouse is truly dead. She rips her way back onto her wild running circuit then, her claws making a vicious noise on the carpet beneath her as she runs back and forth on the ground near my bed, a queen sized… no… king sized mattress which lays on the ground in the living room. This is the time when she redistributes her vanquished foes. She will leave one or two near my bed or on my bed, an offering of thanks, or love, or perhaps the dead mice are charity on her part. She does the same in the bedroom where the woman still quietly sleeps under covers, scant clothing, and yards of beautiful smooth skin. One or two mice for the woman near her smaller bed which sits higher up than mine. She places one or two dead mice near her own food bowl. She is conservative in this way, saving rodent meat for a day of famine when the cheaply constructed blue plastic food container may appear to her empty. A day when her hunt might have to become real. Or perhaps this mouse is also an offering of thanks, to the cat gods, a sacrifice at the harvest to ensure greater harvest, or sustained harvest, on the morrow. Maggie will run about, possessed by her morning devil, for about half an hour. Then a snack from the blue bowl, and a sip of water from the black ceramic bowl. I go to lay next to the woman for a time, and the cat trots in and leaps up onto the bed with a half-grunt, half-squeak, laying herself atop my arm and the woman’s torso over which my arm lays. The feline is like a long, constantly warm pillow of fur and I appreciate the fact that, in her own way, she loves both the woman and I very much. We three seem complete, for once, in that moment, each of us in contact with the other, and each of us present in the tiny span of time, being at different levels of awakeness to the day and to the life.
I whisper to the woman:
“It’s like we’re a little family.”
She smiles without opening her eyes. Her side of her bed is warm, and I have not slept in that bed in a long time, and perhaps that is why her smile is brief. Perhaps to her, we are not closely enough to a little family. But with the cat lounging across our bodies, I feel that we are and I believe the cat does too, and she didn’t raise contention at my words, but smiled. So I think that she feels it too, though she may presently want more.
We all want more. The cat offers her sacrifice to the blue bowl in want of greater or sustained harvest. I lay in my bed reading Luke in want of greater knowledge of love. The woman, Jera, smiles a smile that ends before I thought it should, wanting that I should be closer to family than perhaps she perceives me to be. Yet all the desires in this tiny home have not torn us apart as of yet. This is a beautiful morning of un-sated wants and tiny little efforts (smiles, devoured text, murdered mice) that satisfy all in their own way. Our needs, here, our wants, don’t require to be satiated. We are a little family of little efforts and little wants and little moments laying together or having a cigarette on the porch, and it pains me that our efforts ever have to become greater.
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