dream nightmare thing from a bit ago
I woke up in my childhood bedroom. My twin-sized bed was surrounded by wooden headboards, nailed and drilled in by someone I’d never get to meet. I was on the bed. Sleeping, on my back. I never sleep on my back. I sat up like a corpse would at a funeral. Joints stiff and aching as I sat up mechanically.
The same carpet was on the floor. Half underneath my bed. It was colorful, but I can’t remember the exact colors it had.
Then, I saw her.
The world had shifted. I felt it, and saw it like a heat wave pass by in front of my eyes. I remembered that story of a headless chicken that survived much longer than any creature without a head should’ve. But this was not gory. It was not bloody or obscene, and it wasn’t violent. But she didn’t have a head.
My cat. My daughter– I felt so strongly in this room that she was my real child, different in the way I think of myself as her “dad” in the real world. I’m not her parent. Obviously, she is a cat, and I am a human. But in this space, in this room, she was my own in a way I’ve never felt before.
She was headless. Where a head should have started from her neck, it stopped. Smoothed out in a similar fashion to amputees with a healed stump or stub for a limb. It was covered in fur, blending in as if cats were creatures just born headless from the start.
The change wasn’t violent. There was no invisible hand that severed her head and removed it. But something shifted in the world. Like a greater being pushed the Earth over a little to grab a pen on the other side of the galaxy. And suddenly, she was headless.
I got down on– or collapsed, I can’t remember– to my knees, immediately stroking her fur as tears poured from my eyes. In whatever new reality this was, she still recognized me. Without a head and without a face. Without eyes or a mouth or whiskers or ears or a nose to sense me with.
She came over to my hand cheerfully, as if nothing had changed. As if things were normal. I couldn’t hear her purr, but her body vibrated and breathed without sound to accompany it. Something had changed in me, too. But I couldn’t place what it was. There was no mirror to look at myself in, and I wasn’t eager to find one.
My hands shook– as they always do– as I held her as gently as I could. She had no brain, and yet…
Blind faith is a saying known by many. Using the term senseless faith would be accurate here, but it implies a metaphor that it was in poor taste to have faith in the first place. I know others can’t look into my brain, just as I can’t with theirs. Just as we could hold hands and our atoms would never touch, we can only know about someone else to the same extent. And usually that’s good enough. Sometimes it’s not. That’s life.
But in that moment, in that place, with her in my arms, I felt the trust she had in me was something I knew like I knew how to breathe mere seconds out of the womb. She had no eyes to see. No ears to hear. No mouth to speak or eat. No nose to smell. No whiskers to feel. No face. No head. And she still chose to trust. To love.
More happened in the dream, but I don’t remember now. I remember my dreams almost every night, but some stick out to me. This was from a few months ago, but I’m just writing it down now. It feels important, but maybe it’s not.
I woke up and I found my cat and laid next to her as she napped. Without any sense beforehand, she opened her eyes to see me in front of her. She started to purr. It felt like maybe there was a peacefulness in life that I hadn’t felt before. It sticks with me now, even throughout all of these times. A sense of peace in knowing that if I was without a head, I would end up lying next to her just enjoying her company. My hand gently stroking her fur as I feel the vibration and expansion and deflation of her breaths and purrs. Knowing that it is enough. Feeling like it is, anyway.