Movement lies in the cycles of every day, and in that movement is life. My life.
The sun’s cycle is one, no less important for its ordinariness. I never seek it out, but I’m asleep when the sun is furthest away, tucked into my comfortable bed. I’m called to wake when the rays sweep beyond the heavy, white curtain that preserves my night, and glimmer against the glass door. There are other cycles, just as present. I’m called to eat, and I do. I’m urged into play, and I do. When the irrepressible energy of the day strikes me, I run and run and run, until I slump, panting. As the sounds of traffic pick up, I find my spot on the divan in the balcony, and I settle down to watch vehicles trundle to and fro. Back and forth. Everyday.
I’m urged too into love. You might think a beautiful thing like love would never be greyed into routine. But the cycles aren’t bad in themselves, because life, and pleasure, is woven into them. When they, my misshapen family touch me, stroke me, it ripples through my fur. When they take into their arms, raise me to heights my legs cannot take me, I am not afraid, because I trust, and trust is love. Their warm, familiar embrace wraps me like a cocoon. They make soothing gibberish sounds. I respond, I say I love you too. On another day, I might climb into their laps as they sit down. Or wrap myself around an overlarge leg, and sleep, breathing in their scent and warmth. It manifests in everchanging ways, but it’s in the cycles that love resides.
Sometimes, just sometimes, something genuinely new happens. There’s someone new. Great, big, tall, clumsy, smelly, but someone new and love-filled. His newness fills my space. Where I sometimes sat, and watched the birds fly along impossible paths, he sits, and makes nonsense sounds. But paradoxically, the more he occupies, the more my love grows. He’s a stranger! I should be afraid but I am not. I should shout and warn, but I gibber and cuddle. Perhaps it’s love so great, love so full, I can’t help give back.
The cycles of routine creep, and their loving caress transmutes the novel. When I hear his body shuffle, hanging on to dregs of sleep, I run full tilt to where he lies, and I jump and shout until he’s there where he’s not. When I hear his feet pad along to the kitchen, I feel the morning energy call to me, and where I ran, I now go to him, and ask him if he wants to play with me instead. He’s slow, and he lumbers, but he joins me. I weave in and out, from one side to the other, dodging him. When he’s slumped for hours in the chair, and when the day’s at its lowest ebb, I seek him out, nudge him and say hello. He says something, but his posture is stiffer, his face crinkled, and I know he’s happy. What’s a new cycle but a cycle?
Then one day, it’s broken. I climb into my new favourite spot, where the sun has warmed the cushions just enough, and where he likes to sit, but he isn’t there. When the bed no longer creaks in promise of his waking, I go there anyway. My legs aren’t strong enough for me to jump, but I feel his presence, he must still be there right? I jump and shout, but he doesn’t appear. His scent lingers in the air, and I follow it into unfamiliar spots. I clamber over uncomfortably high boxes into strange rooms, cautious, alert, hopeful. The scent weaves in the air, tantalising, but never forming into him. The others are there. They’re clumsy, noisy and smelly too, and I love them, each in their own way. But they’re here, and he’s not. I’m busy searching, and they hold me up, lift me impossibly high. The warm, familiar embrace is still there, but the hugs are too long, and I wiggle, uncomfortable. Their words are softer, more soothing. I insist that I love them, but I have to go. They shush me, saying reassuring things I don’t understand. I brush it off as human fickleness. I run and run, and find another trail. This one is faint, and withered, suggestive of older, rarer patterns, but with my focus turned to it, sharpens into a path. I run to the sofa by the boxes where they - and he - keep the shoes they put on. I don’t come here often. Vague anxieties assail me here, and I think of cycles without my family. Now though, the scent of new love was here. It is no more alive than any other, but I’m tired, and it’s a welcoming place, and I curl up to rest. When I open my eyes, I see them watch me, and there are tears in their eyes.
The trails of promise fade, and the new, new routine becomes just a routine. I sleep by the boxes, and where the sun burns sharp, until I no longer do. An unformed thought hovers on the edge of my consciousness. This love, a love so great and surprising that took over my cycles for a period, it isn’t what I believed it to be. Deep in the deepest of my memories, so ravaged by the cycles of time that it bears only the crudest similarity to the now, he was there. It wasn’t an inexplicable connection with a stranger, but a rekindled one with a loved one from a memory. I can almost remember being held in his different, yet same, arms, ensconced in the same, yet different warmth. I can almost remember, but not quite.
I no longer look, and even the dead trails disappear, not just dead but forgotten. Until all that remains is a look in the eye, a quirky habit, and a promise. A promise of a future that will make the unfamiliar familiar again.
