Picture a circus tiger. Beholden to the cruel whims of circumstance, ensnared in a system that renders its life to nothing more than spectacle, it prowls the perimeter of its cramped cage with Sisyphean contempt. Here is a tortured—though cool as hell—soul. But Jackie, you say, you’re a university student with a delicate emotional constitution. How could you possibly relate?
Enter the pandemic. I am a nervous person by nature, a quality that the COVID-19 circus only exacerbated. My daily state-sanctioned walk was a source of catharsis (I’m outside!) but also stress (I’m outside…). Each day, like an echo of the proverbial tiger, I traced the same six square blocks of my neighbourhood, nebulously discontent but nonetheless grateful to escape the blue glow of my laptop screen.
Amid this deluge of screen time, my first fully online semester was a study in staying afloat. Tides of academic commitment swallowed my free time, and my work day often bloated into the evening, and then night. Usually, I had to delegate my walks to the wee hours of the night in effort to focus on class and avoid people in the day.
Of course, walking in the dark brings its own flavour of anxiety—I’m no stranger to the classic image of a woman alone at night, house keys fisted like claws. I was, and still am, prone to paranoia. Anything from a mysterious slam to a literal toaster can prompt an adrenal response out of me. For this reason, I couldn’t wander alone, even though I knew logically I’d be fine. Two of my roommates went to bed at a reasonable hour, but the third, Josie, was a fellow night owl like me. We buddy-systemed our way into a routine: Stumble through Zoom class in the day, wade through the afternoon in a depressed nap, before eventually stalking the streets in feline parody around 1 a.m.
I remember that it rained during our first midnight excursion, damp soil blooming under the drizzle, street lamps casting the puddles into oily orange on the concrete. Josie and I trekked out regardless. Here’s another fact about me: I distract easily. While the night was more peaceful than nerve-wracking when we were together, my mind still jumped around, electric with the day’s energy. We reached a small park that bordered an apartment complex. As the rain slowed, we used our hands to deposit snails from the gravel path into the garden, when something shifted at the clamber of our footsteps. Five cats streaked out of the bushes, leaping through the garden like spooked antelopes before disappearing down the block. A beat passed. I still had snails in each hand. Buoyed by the bizarre encounter—and an unhealthy dose of sleep deprivation—we laughed. I declared that since I had spotted the cats first, I was the winner. What I had won, I didn’t know. But the concept rooted into our shared vernacular, inoculated into our speech like all good inside jokes. We appointed the site “Cat Park,” and the act of spotting cats was given a name: Well, cat spotting.
The next day Josie and I relayed our adventure to our other roommates, and the competition began. One point for an indoor cat spotted through the window. Two points for an outdoor cat on ground level; three points for one on a balcony. A staggering six points for every cat on a leash. Photographic evidence was preferred. We operated on an honour system, as with all our other roommate-sanctioned processes. On a large sticky note pinned to the fridge four names were scrawled, aligned in equally spaced lanes like horses readied behind the gate of a racetrack. We jockeyed for points, the tally marks gradually congregating into inked clusters that advanced across our score paper as time galloped on.
As we navigated communal life with each other in our stamp-sized apartment, cat spotting became an outlet: An excuse to walk with friends, to delight in grainy photos around our kitchen table. Venturing outside during the day was now a novelty, since I could channel any nervous energy into a careful swivel of the head, hoping to catch a flash of fur in my peripheral vision. This was a pacifist sort of hunt in which a photo was the ultimate trophy—a fulfilling yet harmless coping mechanism during the semester’s growing pains.
