Have you ever felt like something else was there in an empty room? Felt the warmth of a person who wasn't around? The presence of life when the only living thing in the room was you?
That was never something I thought about really. We live, we breathe, we die. Admittedly alot happens between life and death and I've thought about that alot, but I never thought about what happens after death. Where we go, what we do. Are we just gone, buried six feet under in a shiny black pretentious box, body along with soul or does only our body stop truly breathing, allowing our spirit to remain with our loved ones?
No, those thoughts never really came to the fore front of my mind. I was just me, living in my own little word with an imagination too big for my mind and insecurities too much for one girl to handle. So why would my imagination, filled with dreams for the future that were still in the process of being erased and rewritten for the hundredth time, go to such thoughts of afterlife or lack therefore of?
Now the answer to this question may sound rather silly and foolish but in all truth I do believe animals, along with young children, have the wonder to believe in what we so readily believe to be myth or just plain unrealistic. Morals being mashed into our heads, crowding and leaving little room for the unknown around us, changes us from what we once had as a child.
Those imaginary friends that build from books and television shows or just to get away from that bully at school, the belief that everything your parents say is true because if your parents lie then what is there in this world that could be true and the feeling of being perfectly safe at all times with everyone around you. With all the unjustness of the world not crowding your brain, when the logics of math and science do not exist in the world you so lovingly know and live in everything is a possibility. And how I wish to go back to the naive wonders of being young and uneducated.
Because back then it would have been understandable that when I awoke from a nap, in an empty house, with my cat beside me that instead of looking at me like she usually does, she was staring at a spot beside my bed near the curtain clad window. Her staring for an immeasurable amount of time would not have given me internal shivers that racked my spine and song lyrics would not have been needed to help my mind stay away from the unnerving feeling my orange tabby was giving me in those few moments that felt like an eternity.
The way I felt her whiskers tickle the back of my hand as her head turned as if watching someone walk from the side of my bed toward the door, like she had with my mother earlier in the day. That would not have made me cringe and look around my room with wide and uncertain eyes. Nor would it have made me try my best to block out my surroundings with the lyrics to rusty halo by the script, my eyes squeezing shut, begging sleep to evade me so that my fifteen year old mind would not come to irrational conclusions.
Maybe, just maybe, if I had been younger when this happened, more susceptible to ideas of the unknown, this would have excited me. Maybe I would have looked behind me and seen what I so unrealistically believe she saw. I might have watched my late grandfather's figure walking from my bedroom one last time or Hope, my first dog not to mention my first pet, wander through the room knocking everything on my bookshelf off with one exaggerated sweep of her golden tail. Or maybe the old owner of this house I now live in would be wondering who the hell was lying in his old office.
It could have been Marilyn Monroe or Adolf Hitler for all I know, but I will never know because however much I wish that the imagination of my five year old self was with me in that moment, it was not. So here I am, hours later wondering what happened and why? Or is this all the musings and over thinking of a groggy girl whose mind is exhausted from the exams she just finished writing and the wandering eyes of a bored cat?!
Who knows for sure?!
My cat, but she'll never tell.