The Cat

I always thought that my childhood had been incredibly mundane, and pathetically ordinary. Tucked away and hidden between hills and trees, I had two parents who rarely argued, two brothers who loved me dearly, a dog, a cat, and a quaint farm full of animals. In fact, my first years seemed so ordinary that I was beginning to wonder what might have created the skeptical thing I am. There must have been some unconventional event that made me.

As I dove headlong into the crack in my skull where all of my lost memories go, I noticed that perhaps it is not a trait to be blamed on a single event. Rather, it was a string of unresolved misadventures that were perpetuated too far into the present.

All of this, for brevity’s sake, can be summed up and hemmed into the stitches that held one small stuffed toy together. I can’t remember what it looked like new—did it ever only have three whiskers? Probably not. But it certainly had a little pink nose at one point, and once upon a time, it purred when you squeezed it around the middle. It was marbled orange and white with a green bean stare that never wavered from my own. He was unique, not because he was mine, but because he was never given a name. I named everything: my toys, the rocks in my collection, as well as my menagerie of imaginary friends. But this kitten was never more than “the Cat.”

I carried him everywhere, indoors and out, and the brave soldier saw more than I’m sure he’d care to tell. The Cat had been missing in action on several occasions, once for more than a month. He’d been left for dead in the ankle-high grass, fallen from my careless fingers in the north hayfield, only to be found at harvest just before the slicing-dagger maw of the hay mower devoured him. My father found him and passed him on to my mother who cleaned him and left him on my bed.

If I remember correctly, that’s when he stopped purring. Perhaps he had seen too much, I thought. His time in the wild had left him shell-shocked. He should have been given the Purple Heart. He was my comrade-in-arms, and silent though he was, he was there when it all started.

When I would start shaking. When my lungs lost sight of their purpose and my throat would close up like I was having an allergic reaction. Wanting nothing more than to scream, unable to even whisper, my vision would start to swim. I would curl my arms around the Cat and finally begin to cry.

My mother would prod me, “What’s wrong?” And I wanted to tell her, but words couldn’t explain the train wreck in my head when I was trying to sleep or to go out with friends. My emotions were so swirled together, so lost and confused, it felt as if they’d been stuck in a washing machine set to high speed spin, then let loose to stumble about like drunken university students after homecoming.

A child of seven doesn’t have those words.

My mother didn't have the words, either. She’d sit there in front of me as I clutched the Cat, sobbing into his head that once purred, not saying a thing. When the tears had run out and my lungs got their act together, she would ask it again.

“What’s wrong?”

I didn’t know.

And that made me afraid. I was afraid of what I felt and couldn’t comprehend. I spent my days buried in fear that the strange feeling might come calling again.

It called often.

I would press the Cat into my chest. I would dig my fingers into his scratchy fur, looking for the lungs I didn’t have, as if it might have stolen mine. She would ask me the same question; I would give her the same answer.

I was told not to worry about the feeling. I was told to hope it would go away. Words were tossed around for what might be wrong with me. I remember holding the Cat—my last memory with it—as my parents argued about my ailment.

They settled after some time on a phrase I will never forget.

“She’s just shy.”

I lost the Cat not long after, which was inevitable in his wanderlust life, and with it went the feeling and the fear. The problem had vanished much like it had come: with the Cat. So it was forgotten.

Until years later, when I left my haven of hills and trees for a university that hosted enough students to fill my hometown tenfold. I had to talk to these people. I had to make friends. I had to have the “university experience.”

The pressure sent me over the edge, and my lungs started malfunctioning again—once a week, twice, three times, daily. It wasn’t the Cat that had caused my sickness like my nine-year-old self had assumed. It was people. It was pressure. And I was folding like an origami house squashed under the stack of textbooks I carried around.

But I finally understood.

I had a social anxiety disorder.

Understanding the problem didn’t make it go away, but it offered a sense of relief. I wasn’t an anomaly among human kind.

I was ordinary.