After you’ve exhausted every costume in the villain-victim wardrobe, here and there, you fall for hope. You buy bestselling fables that preach how anyone can become anyone they wish, as long as they’re done being themselves. My favourite influencer has convinced me that I must begin again, that a solo park picnic would cleanse my soul.
So I arrive in Cubbon Park, lay myself down between a smoggy sky and prickly grass, force-fit my buttocks into comfort, and perform self-care in pastels. I have curated redemption with a green apple, a romance novel, and a borrowed yoga mat. Breathe in, breathe out, two yoga poses: warrior and child.
And even before any of my clots could reverse the knots, I’m bored and distracted. I remember how I am not green juice, pastel jumpers, and gratitude journals. Not the sunshine arching from my sleeves. I’m born with unfixable frizz, dreams drawn with leftover charcoal, and the closest thing to a rainbow I’ve experienced is distorted colours in roadside puddles. And none of this is a grand tragedy. I’ve learned to party with my brokenness and painkillers. It’s the backache that bothers me, and the occasional mood catastrophes. Also, the boys who seem to run away. And also the recent blunder at work. It’s the paranoia of permanence; it’s the permanence of paranoia.
But it was too early to give up. So, from yoga, I switch to a book. Three pages in, and I feel like the love story doesn’t deserve a happy ending. I shut my book and do some people-watching, happy and healthy folks hanging out in the park.
An old man in loose cotton pants walks past me along the jogging track. He smiles at me, and I smile back. But then, I immediately suspect that he was staring at my breasts. This is the problem: I expect the worst from people, a sick little coping trick. I conspire all these rituals of rebirth, but I am already abandoning my own resurrection because a man walks by and I feel the heat of his gaze like a stain across my chest. I run away from peace the moment it finds me, like I’m afraid it came with strings that would strangle me at night.
I was just about to roll back my yoga mat, but then Sheela comes.
Sheela is the stray cat. Black, petite, probably had it bad. I converge on the idea that this is it, this is my calling: to be that lady who walks away from the bland and blank, with the black cat.
And Sheela, despite being spent and limping with a broken limb, walks with a halo, like she has eaten up the darkness. I want her, I decide. That’s the kind of army I want to raise in my backyard, not basil and rosemary. I follow Sheela.
Sheela is dragging something behind a bush: a dead crow, feast for the day. She plucks apart the feathers, tosses them into the air, and turns back to ensure I’m watching her theatre. She lays it down and tears it apart with her claws and teeth. She does not rush. She devours the dead piece by piece. She looks at me again.
“I’m not impressed,” I let her know. There’s no greatness in desecrating the already dead.
And then came my fatal flaw: despite my need, my ego wouldn’t kneel. Even here, I feel the need to dominate. So I offer Sheela my half-bitten green apple and place it before her like bait.
Sheela walks up to me, sniffs through the apple, lingers around, almost fooling me into the feeling of victory. But then, with her broken limb, she kicks the apple toward me like a verdict. She does not barter with broken girls. She’s better than that. Offended, she disappears, leaving behind the apple and the crow’s remains.
I go back to my yoga mat. I stretch my left thigh and do a pose that makes no sense, hoping my blood flows through corners of healing veins and erases this painful memory of cat rejection. My grandma would be ashamed. She housed 14 cats, and I couldn’t manage even one.
The old man returns, finishing his last round on the running track. He stares again, definitely at my chest, openly now, hungrily, with a sly smile. I stare back at him. I want to protest. But my eyes blink faster than my courage, and they begin to water, so I run.
I run back home with my hard-earned epiphany. I know why I can’t have Sheela. She saw through my bluff of toughness.
I hadn’t eaten my darkness yet.