Misery Loves Company Six Feet Apart: Part 3 - How Many Cats to Screw in a Lightbulb?

Pearl and Lightbulb 2021

This post was originally published August 27, 2021.

I wanted a dog, but dogs require significantly more money and work than a cat, so I called up the shelter and asked for the friendliest one they had. Now, I’m nearly a year into rooming with Pearl. She stands on the counters and never pays her share of the rent, but I wouldn’t have anyone else.

I always knew I would get a cat. I love cats, and having grown up with furry friends, it was hard to live without one. I would sit at my dining table and look over into the living room, thinking that the space was a little too empty, the air a little too quiet, and the ambience a little too cold.

I was six months into lockdown and at the beginning of understanding my pain problems. I had been putting off getting a cat for reasons I no longer remember. I think, like most things in 2020, I wanted to have a few things more figured out before introducing big life changes. But by the end of September, I was tired of waiting and spent a Sunday morning packing a carrier into my car and driving to the local humane society to meet my future pet.

Pearl is a lot of things I’m not. She’s extroverted, chatty, and brazenly trusting of strangers. She didn’t waste any time before climbing into my lap when she first saw me. My heart immediately exploded with love. I was so happy that she was mine to take home.

Pearl was something else too. She was the first time I really took control of my happiness since the pandemic started.

Augusta, ME 2021

A couple weeks ago, I changed a lightbulb above my bathroom mirror. Pearl perched herself on the toilet, slowly extending her paw towards the burnt out lightbulb that rested on the counter. Right before changing it, I had been out walking. When I had gotten home, I didn't want to stop moving, so I dragged a wooden chair down the hall, climbed on top of it, and switched out the bulbs.

I’ve been walking a lot this summer, trying to make up for all the hikes I missed out on last year. I downloaded the AllTrails app to my phone and have visited almost all the walking trails listed near me. The trails don't compare to my cancelled trip to Europe, but they're new destinations just the same. They're new places for me to explore, and new reasons to get out of my apartment. Sometimes I take Pearl with me. Most of the time, it's just me, my camera, and the latest audiobook or podcast I've been listening to.

I swiped the bulb out from under Pearl's paw and carried on with my day.

The first time I put Pearl into a leash and harness, she stumbled into the wall. I spent weeks trying to coax her around the apartment with treats and laser pointers, but she preferred to stubbornly sprawl out on the carpet instead. Eventually, I decided I was just going to take her outside. With a bag full of Greenies, water, and toys, I set her down on the grass of a local, mostly unused park. She was leading me away before I had a chance to lock the car. She learned very quickly that walking on a leash was not that different from walking in general.

Every time I leave the apartment to do something new---or old---I feel like I'm testing my proverbial leash to see how far it will take me.

I feel like I'm a year behind, and I'm not sure when or if that feeling will ever shake. Like many people, I went into 2020 with a lot of goals and aspirations that were soon to be smothered by the reality of a global health crisis.

Re-entering the world is scary. What’s scarier is that this pandemic is not over. I’m blessed to live in a place with high vaccine rates, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are COVID variants, that countries across the world are still struggling, that America is still one of them, even if it looks a little better than it did a year ago. Prices are inflating, while store stock is diminishing in quality and quantity. It doesn’t change the fact that over 7.6 billion people experienced a shared trauma that spiraled into other devastating situations for many of them. It doesn’t help that people are actively denying the existence of the trauma and the media is giving them a platform to do it.

There’s a non-zero chance that the state of things will get worse before they get better. Ironically, I think knowing that has made moving forward easier for me. Things will be inevitably, permanently different. The person I wanted to be at this stage in my life doesn’t fit in this world anymore.

Augusta, ME 2021

My phone's photo library is filling up with some truly terrible pictures. Mostly of water, trees, and my cat. Each time I go for a walk, I’ll take at least one. Photography was a creative hobby that I never felt the need to be good at, and I’m remembering how much I like doing it. My pictures are not what they used to be. I’m relearning how to get the right lighting and applying the rule of threes. Every once in about 100 clicks, I'll get a good one, but the important thing isn’t that my pictures are good, it’s that I've taken them.

This is an idea that I’m trying to carry over into other things I do, especially my writing. If getting Pearl was my first big step towards taking control of my happiness since the pandemic started, then pressing publish on this blog post will have been the latest. It doesn’t matter how many times I re-read and re-work this series, it will never be my best work, but I suppose it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be written.

The momentum is not steady yet. When it comes to many things there are no smooth transitions like that of going for a walk to changing my lightbulb. Instead, there's a lot of stopping and starting, like the stuttering of a car's engine that's been left to sit for too long.

I hope that will one day change. In the meantime, I'll try to keep writing and walking. Maybe one day, I'll figure out how to hold the things I care about close, while still keeping six feet apart.