Kittens on Vacation

The kitten sisters went on their 2nd annual vacation; it was a spiritual event

Unedited journal entry from July 12, 2024:

            The cats and I both live as animals that exist somewhere between wild and domesticated. Whenever I do something for the cats, I know I am doing it for myself too, because we exist as a little unit, networked and interdependent as we are. The three of us, living together, form a little home; the dynamic interplay of each of our behaviors, preferences, and subjectivities collectively constituting what we perceive to be reality. We create this little reality called “home” together, which is as much the physical space this all plays out in as it is any of our presences within it.

            They stare out the windows in Brooklyn, longing to be able to pursue the pigeons just beyond their reach. They grow docile and sleep. They play with toys that are imitations of the real things: toy mice, and climbing up miniature cat “trees.” And I am the same, looking longingly at the river beyond the BQE, wishing to be on a boat in the open air, then turning to open apps that approximate human contact while watching TV shows that depict something like human life. We stay in our little lair where we are endlessly safe and trapped.

            This is the second year now I’ve taken the cats to Block Island. They turn 2 years old this month. It is the kittens’ annual vacation, and for that reason, mine, too. I let them out this morning. They explored gingerly at first, growing bolder and more confident with each passing minute. There’s something so uncanny and thrilling and heartbreaking for me, seeing their glistening fur I’ve seen a thousand times on my couch or on the duvet cover of my bed, now in broad daylight amidst the backdrop of emerald-hued grass and the Great Salt Pond beyond. We’re all more attuned here, less listless. But we are also visitors. They don’t really know how to fend for themselves out here, though I like to imagine they could manage. Still, there is something sweet in knowing they will come home when it is time to eat, that they know they can rely on me. I like to see this kind of dependence not as a disability but as a form of love.

            Sesame was exploring a while and when she saw me reemerge from the house came running towards me. She knows me, I am familiar. It reminded me of when I’ve come running home, after doing too many drugs or traveling around for too long. They are each so eager to run out when the door opens, and so docile when they get picked up when it’s time to come back inside.

            Perhaps exploring is only safe when you know you have a home or shelter to return to. You can rebel against the home and derealize it exactly because it is a constant that promises to always hold you. The structures – physical, familial, societal – that keep us safe are the same ones that confine us. I think this maybe is what family is. Including the “human family.” This ambivalence and dual-sided nature is all part of it: loving that which holds you – needing it, even – and needing also to rebel against and wretch yourself from its embrace. The Embrace of the Serpent, as the title of a book I bought but have never opened reads. It sits on my shelf, its profundity perhaps too threatening for me to engage with or too known to me already to feel useful.

            The cats and I want as badly to be “free,” to go outside, to wander, as we want a home to return to, a bed to sleep on, to sit in the warmth of someone’s lap who has stroked us countless times and whose smell evokes a sense of instant recognition and comfort. Coming and going, like this. I’ve always said I love leaving New York City and I love returning to it, and that is true. I think that is what “home” is all about. “Home” and “family” are probably just synonyms, though too sadly and too often one does not bear a felt resemblance to the other.

            So the cats and I are here now, on the screen porch, in the in-between place. Such are our existences. We’re none of us meant to live fully outside nor fully inside. We were all once more wild, but that was then, and this is now, and so we, as a little family, a mobile “home,” negotiate how much venturing afield was enough, was too much, and when is it time to return, to come indoors, and to rest.