I woke up early this morning and decided to stay at home. A slow morning, one that wasn’t riddled with the rigid rules I decided to set myself the day before, a structured check list of errands and things to do. I didn’t go to the gym. I didn’t go for a walk to get in my eight-thousand steps before nine-a.m. I didn’t go to the shops to buy my groceries for the week and I didn’t think about getting in my protein and healthy fats.
I simply woke up, went downstairs, and made myself a tea.
It’s just me and the cat. As soon as he spotted me, he started skulking around and meowing by the door to be let out – but I didn’t want to have to watch over him and devote these first precious hours to preventing his stealthy escape from the barricaded garden walls. Why does he want to do that? Why can’t he just want to be still like me on this slow Sunday morning? But eventually I give in and open the doors; kind of because I’d like to enjoy the fresh air myself this morning, but mostly because his little face and tiny paws propping him up on my legs to be carried have moved me, although I know it is but manipulation. He doesn’t actually want to be carried and he will jump away from me as soon as he feels the warm air on his whiskers.
I watch him as he walks around the patio, sniffing at the ground and pawing at the tiny little ants that are too small to fall victim to his beans. His tail, gently curled, sways through the air in curiosity. I follow him around and he intently bumps into me as he walks – and suddenly he stops, his pale eyes locking onto something behind me. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a common housefly or a robin zooming behind my head? I turn around and follow his gaze – he is staring at a pigeon on the roof of the house, his tail still and poised. Funny boy, afflicted with the arrogance of thinking he can make the bird, safely perched atop the house, his plaything. But the pigeon flies off and he gives up, continuing to make his way to a familiar place instead – nestled behind the plants and bushes, in a cosy den from which he can spot his prey and hide from his captors who dare bring him back inside before he’s done playing.
I spot his face only by his gleaming eyes, like melted lemon ice lollies, and he jumps out just to eye up the forbidden platform in the corner – a giant plant pot filled with bags of soil, the perfect vehicle from which he can pounce onto the trellis and make his escape. But I grab him, feeling the weight and softness of his belly, filled with fresh chicken and treats, and I wonder if he knows he’s cute, a cootle-wootle mr bootle, or he thinks he is a chill mastermind con-artist. He makes no effort to fight back. He is simply a naughty cat trying his luck and he will try again later on, but for now he hides once again behind the bird bath and the foliage.
The bees are hovering over and landing on the plants and the cat is walking around bare-pawed on the soil, the same paws he walks into his litter tray with, the same paws he will lick clean in half an hour, and I wonder why I’m wearing shoes. I slip my feet out of my slippers, worn and warm, and step consciously onto the lawn. The grass feels soft beneath me, and although the breeze chills my legs, the blades feel warm and bouncy. I immediately feel a connection to the earth – not in a hippy way, but in an I am real and I’m just a person and anything could strike me down right now and that would be the end of me kind of way. Walking around barefoot feels sobering and real and I wonder whether I would be happier if I lived like the cat, who has now crawled out of the flowers and is walking slowly, belly low and tail lower, with his eyes locked onto a fly that he is about to murder, because that’s what his instincts tell him to do. Walk barefoot everywhere and kill (or, swat and nibble and bat around until the creature is too mangled to survive. Then eat).
I wonder what my instincts are, because surely they aren’t sitting around, scrolling on my phone, and begrudgingly waiting for the weekend to be over. But my instincts also don’t tell me to lay down and have babies – or has this simply been killed by the former? I want to walk on dirt paths and smell seawater and hike mountains and be in the clouds and hear silence and read books and listen to music – but each time I am filled with the desire to do this, each time I reach the plant pot and see the trellis from which I can escape, I am grabbed by the soft underbelly of real life that tells me I must stay within the confines of what has been given to me, and it sounds like a Teams call and the beeping of a credit card payment.
Stood in the centre of the lawn, I stretch in a way that I don’t stretch indoors, as if the sound of the birds and the wind in the trees, and the feeling of breeze and grass and hanging out with a cat tells my body this is what it needs to do, and I do it and it feels good. I look at my phone but I put it back down again because it doesn’t serve me in any way right now; I just want to be barefoot, and I want to listen to the sound of the cat’s bell as he explores the corners of the garden he has explored a million times before. As if it is brand new.
And then, he glides past me and chooses to go back inside. Just as well because I really need a wee and I can’t go in the soil. I wash my feet of the dirt and the grass, he eats his biscuits like he’s never seen food before (he ate half an hour ago). He will soon be at the door, longing for the garden again, and I am once again writing about writing and wishing this life was different.
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