Aquarium Delirium
I never really counted on finding life-long friends in a city like Beirut - the kind you’d introduce as Uncle or Aunt whatever to your non-existent children living inside your head.
Who would’ve thought I’d be lonely in a place overpopulated with self-loathing fucks like myself. Who would’ve thought I’d find a friend in an abandoned street cat.
I was never properly initiated into Lebanon. There was no rite of passage. All I did was move out of campus and walk into the first overpriced, sad-excuse of a studio. And that was it. I had barely spoken Arabic to anyone other than my parents and siblings. The same can be said about ordering take-out over the phone. At the ever-gleaming age of 23, my stutter socially haunted my every step forward.
My cat, Bukowski, wobbled his way into my life after the pandemic made my world much smaller than I had always assumed it to be; my best friend moved to the US and I broke up with my recurring on-and-off girlfriend who had become my ‘person’ over the course of our relationship, and all that threw me into a whirlpool of a finger-on-lips quiet kind of confusion.
There I was, lamentably approaching the realization that, yes, I’ve met plenty of people in Beirut, but none of them really came to mind when I think of sticking my ass on my yellow couch, lighting a smoke and drinking minute-made coffee out of Batman mugs - that stuff’s reserved for best friends, awkward one-night stands, and long-term girlfriends.
While all that was going through my head, I started thinking about how it would be incredibly nerdy and cool to get a turtle and name it Donatello, the whacky purple mask-wearing ninja turtle. That was a serious thought up until it wasn’t. The thought of getting an aquarium and filling it up with pebbles, rocks, vegetation, and water was okay, but then came the thought of needing to clean it out on a weekly basis, and that’s when everything fell apart. I can barely bring myself to do the dishes - even if the food scraps clinging to the dishes are turning green under the sink.
After eventually moving on from the turtle that never was, Donatello, or whatever its name might be right now, I started desperately looking for another friend, one who actually interacted with me rather than pointlessly moved around its small square box of a house at the speed of absolutely nothing.
My cat-hunt turned into an obsession; at some point, I just woke up, looked up a pet adoption page on instagram, and started texting random people to see if the little guys were still there.
Long story short, I’m a happy father to a little annoying shit who I’ve grown to love everyday; I find myself having conversations with him and imagining him nodding to everything I’m saying as if to make me think he speaks Arabic - talking to a cat sounds comparatively sane when pushed against the notion of talking to plants.
No amount of shredded sofa fabrics would justify adopting a psychotic purr machine, but who needs a comfy seat when they’ve got a friend for approximately 15 years?
