“Can I ask where you got ‘em?”
“Huh…?”
“Your contacts, silly,” she says, giggling through my awkwardness and oh my gosh she called me silly, holy crap.
What is this? I have never reacted this strongly, this quickly, to a pretty girl… emotionally, at least. Physically, I’ve had far stronger reactions. Gosh, but she’s so cute and she takes care of stray cats and I should probably answer her question and stop spacing out because I’m high off my ass.
Not that I can do that in an honest way.
Lying to her feels bad, but what else am I going to do? Tell her they’re not contacts? She won’t believe me unless I switch and, ahahaha, there is no way I’m doing that right now, even if I can—and I can. I can still feel it, can still tell that if I let go, I’ll switch. It feels a little odd, like… like if tinnitus was a physical sensation instead of an auditory one.
“Um… the internet.” There. Nailed it.
I’m so high.
“Oh,” she says, a little dejected as she picks up that I’m not exactly going to be forthcoming with this information (that doesn’t even exist). Regardless, she tries again. “I meant, like, the store?”
“Who is it?” Gwen calls out from her spot on the sofa.
I turn to answer her, calling back, “Not sure!” before returning to the cute girl. “You are…? And, um, can I ask why you have my bag?”
“Oh!” she gasps. “Right! Sorry! I’m Cat—”
Gwen snorts from behind me, and I make a mental note to nip at her ankles later.
“—and this is your bag, okay, perfect. I found it outside last night, by the dumpsters. I was gonna take it because it’s a really cool bag and I thought someone had just tossed it, but there was a cat, like, guarding it? So I left ‘cause I didn’t wanna get attacked and watched it from the skywalk, then grabbed the bag when it left. I found keys inside of it for this dorm, though, 112? So… here you go!” she says a little too quickly, thrusting the bag towards me.
All my pins are still there. The leather is a little scuffed, but it’s still in good shape. I breathe out a sigh of relief and scold myself for not remembering the skywalk exists and someone could have seen me switch.
And strip naked, sure, but I’m more worried about the cat transformation thing.
Welp. Nothing I can do now, so I ignore it.
“That’s weird,” I lie, “but thanks.” I set my backpack down to the side of the door. “Short for Catherine?”
“Cathleen,” she corrects with a groan. “Cath is fine too, but everyone calls me Cat. You… look familiar. Are you in the forensic psych class?”
I… am… “The Monday, Wednesday, Friday one? AM?”
“Yeah! With Professor Kitsch!”
That’s weird. How have I never noticed this girl—Cath? Cat? Cat—in class before? If she’s seen me enough to recognize me, how have I never seen her in turn? I’m a pretty big lesbian. Spotting cute girls is kind of my thing. Or… I was a huge lesbian. Still am?
Ugh, I’m… I’m figuring it out.
I go ahead and assume it’s mostly my (beautiful) hair that gave me away, and I blame my own social ineptitude and lack of situational awareness at having failed to ever notice Cat. Maybe she just sits in the back of class or something—it would make sense, since I’m near the middle-front usually and cannot wait to get out once a lecture is over. Too many people all around me, making too much noise, all at once. Sitting in one place for too long.
I shudder.
I need to get out of this conversation and relax. I’m making myself anxious, or the weed is, or we both are, me and the weed.
“Yeah, I’m in it. Look, I’m like… super high right now. I’d love to chat some more tomorrow in class if that’s okay?”
Why did I say that. I’d “love to chat some more”? What the hell is wrong with me. She doesn’t—
“Ah, sorry!” she yelps. “I’d… like to chat too! I’ll see you tomorrow! Okay bye!”
And then she’s gone and I am closing the door and Gwen is snickering and Evan is hiding a smile—unsuccessfully—with one of his big ol’ meaty gamer athlete hands. I ignore them and refill my mug with more milk before popping it in the microwave and slamming the door a little too hard.
“Sorry,” I mumble, no longer feeling like being high. Hey, I wonder if turning into a cat would zap all the weed out of my system…
I can still feel it. The weird pseudo-physical kind-of-like-tinnitus sensation is practically overflowing inside of me, pouring out of my body. I was so awkward. I got upset and maybe scared Gwen and Evan by slamming the microwave. Cat might not be into me, might think I’m weird. She left so quickly. I probably would have as well if I’d had to talk to myself. I’m not a fun person to talk to. I’m so weird. I’m so awkward. Of course she wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. She didn’t want to be rude or anything, so she said we could talk in class tomorrow, and we could, but I’m not gonna approach her because what if she was just being nice and didn’t actually mean it?
“Gwen?” I ask hesitantly, more than a little fear in my voice as I stare at her over the counter. “I think I’m about to switch again.”
“Don’t you dare!” Gwen cries out, hopping off the couch and running over to give me… a hug, probably.
Why doesn’t she want me to? She… doesn’t want me to be myself?
Oh…
Is… is being a cat who I am? Is that my self?
I don’t want a hug unless I’m partaking in it as a cat, and that’s okay. Gwen will accept me no matter what.
Right?
This is a lot of feelings. I’ve barely been able to process how I feel in the moments leading up to me switching before, so why am I able to do it now?
I don’t need to deal with this, with these feelings. I can just—
Poof.
Immediately better.
Lower to the ground, smaller, less noticeable. Potentially, having less brain mass may mean I don’t have to think as much as I do normally. I haven’t thought about that before. And obviously, whatever form a person’s consciousness takes isn’t really related to their brain given how much I’ve swapped between having two different brains over the last few days. If I have cat brain, science says I should no longer be Alice. I should have cat intelligence—but I don’t. I am Alice. I can recognize more, do more, than a regular cat would be capable of.
“Goddamn it!” Gwen curses as she rounds the counter to look down at me with a most displeased expression stretched across her face. Her piercings make her look extra bitchy. What’d I do? Wait, no, why didn’t she want me to do this?
“Mreow?”
“Fuck, I think I was right,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me, herself, or Evan (for some reason).
“Stressed thing?” Evan casually asks from his spot on the couch. I can’t see him—I haven’t moved since I switched and am currently sitting beside my fallen shirt, staring up at Gwen.
“Yeah,” she says, placing her hands on her hips. “Or uncomfortable. Overwhelmed, maybe. Not sure. I saw her spiralling before she turned this time.”
Is my face really that readable?
Also, how does she know that? I didn’t tell her for exactly this reason.
I squint at her and tilt my head, hoping to convey my question. I’m… not happy about Evan knowing about this and her talking to him behind my back. I don’t want to claw her or Evan or anything, but I’m not happy about it. Partly because she never asked me, partly because we barely know this dude, partly because I don’t like other people talking about me behind my back, but who does?
“What, how I knew?” she guesses correctly. I growl, wondering if she knows me too well. “Oh hush. Claw me or be quiet. Anyways, I didn’t know until you reacted like this—”
Goddamn it.
“—and I only guessed it in the first place because you told me turning back into a human required you feeling safe. Not hard to infer turning into a cat would be a response to feeling unsafe in some way, is it?”
Goddamn it.
“It suits you. You lose most of your autonomy. You don’t have to talk to people. You’re smaller, more out of the way. You’re biologically female, but I’m not sure if that’s a huge part of it? Regardless, you also don’t have to interact with the real world and no one expects anything from you. Meow if I’m wrong.” The source of this chapter is g.com.
God fucking damn it.
I hiss at her and, naturally, run away to my bedroom.
“Fuck, Alice! Wait!” she says, and I can feel her chasing after me, so I run faster and scramble into the back of my closet, hiding myself in darkness I know she can’t see in and burrowing beneath a fallen sweater.
“Alice, please,” she says, closing my door behind her as she steps inside my room, trapping me.
I hear her sit on my bed as she lets out a sigh.
It takes a minute, but she does talk, eventually. Her words are slow and her voice is weighty from being high, but she manages. “Look, I’m not gonna try and find you, but I am gonna say what I’ve got to say before I leave. I promise I’m not upset at you, I promise you’re safe. If you’d like me to stop, you can ask me to—as a human.”
Despite myself, I do feel safe, and I think it’s only because she promised me I was and I trust Gwen more than anyone else in the world, including myself. With that, I feel I can become human again, but I have no intention of doing so.
If I’m human, I have to go to class tomorrow. Well, I don’t, but I’ll feel obligated to, and that means running into Cat, probably, and being rejected, probably, and then turning into a cat in front of a hundred different people I’ve barely interacted with… probably.
I stay cat, I stay hidden, I stay small.
“Well, okay then. Here goes: Alice, I feel like I’m losing my best friend. I love that you enjoy being a cat—I’m even a little jealous. But you’re using it to avoid real life.
“Do you remember,” she says, pausing to sigh, “when… maybe a month after we met, you told me you wanted to be put in a medically induced coma? You didn’t want to die, but you didn’t want to live anymore, either. I think… I think that might be what you’re doing now. And it genuinely could work for you if you wanted to stay a cat in the long run, it really could…
“I guess what I'm saying is... you really do look like you love it, and trust me when I say I am so happy for you that you’ve found an outlet that works, but I want you to ask yourself if it is working, and if so, how it’s working. Why do you become a human when you feel safe, instead of the other way around? Why does your mind decide that becoming a cat is a protection mechanism? Why is losing agency and the ability to communicate properly and a ton of physical mass and autonomy a protection thing, and what is it protecting you from?”
I don’t know. People? Most people are either sympathetic or apathetic to cats, but the same cannot be said for how they feel towards other people, at least in my eyes. I haven’t had an easy life, and I’d like to think that’s mostly a result of how other people treated me for simply being me. At first, it was for being weird, then being antisocial, then being a loser, then being trans, and then being homeless. I didn’t have real control over those things. I was weird and antisocial and a loser because understanding other people was hard and it was easier to not try. I’m trans because I’m a girl and got the wrong body. I was homeless because if I hadn’t gotten out of that fucking house, I wouldn’t be here today.
Other people will become therapists and social workers and counsellors. I’m not strictly necessary. If it’s easier to give up now, to be happy with what being a cat brings me, what’s so bad about that? I don’t have a responsibility to help other people, that’s for sure—the only person in the entire world who I feel anything for is Gwen. I feel responsible for her. I want to keep her safe, I want to repay her for how much she’s helped me. I have come so far since abandoning my former “life”, and Gwen is the reason I’m still here, still alive.
It’s a good guess, I think. Nothing tells me if I’m right or wrong, but it’s a good guess.
It’s also… okay for me to guess at, okay for me to think about, because I’m in control. I can tell, I know, that it doesn’t matter how I triggered my transformation before—I have more control over it now, and I know I don’t have to turn into a human ever again if I don’t want to.
I can stay a cat forever, no matter how safe I feel.
It’s comforting to know that, to realize it.
I really can just let my life slip away. We can figure out a way to hide me from the RA and find other ways for me to remain important in Gwen’s life. I can sleep against her and cuddle her and be there to support her with my soft fur and purring and other cute cat noises, and she’ll feed me and take care of me and no one will ever expect anything from me.
Ah, but do I want to?
The question I’ve been avoiding surfaces, and I still don’t know if being a cat is worth giving up on my dreams and former life. I won’t ever get to know Cat or anyone else if I stay a cat. I won’t graduate. All the time I’ve spent putting my life back together after I ran away from home will have been for nothing. Sure, something something sunk-cost fallacy, but getting to this point in my life took some serious effort. Applying for all the financial support I could possibly get, getting financial support from the government, finding a decent therapist and working through some seriously heavy shit… it took a long time for me to build up everything I have now.
Do I want to throw that away? Do I want to give up so many things that it would be impossible to count them all, let alone remember all of them as they pop up in what would be my new day-to-day?
I don’t know.
Will I have a choice if I keep turning into a cat, if I keep switching back and forth? Will my human form just be a cat as well, eventually, if I keep switching? Because, while I can choose to remain a cat, I’m pretty sure I can’t choose to remain human. I can hold it back a little, but it really is like a dam. It’ll burst eventually if I have one bad day—no, not even that. One bad minute. One bad interaction with a person or the world. If I’m a cat… I don’t have to face those things. I can get scritches and snuggles and food and I’ll purr and forget about all my worries because they don’t matter when I’m around a trusted human who will take care of me.
“I hope that makes sense,” Gwen mumbles. “I kinda forget some of what I said… still fuckin’ high… but you’ll think about it, yeah?”
Oh. I’m not high anymore. Didn’t even notice ‘til now. Weird—I can get high as a cat, but if I switch to a cat from being human—and presumably, if I’m high as a cat and switch to being human—it looks like I get a drugs reset.
Gwen’s caring for me right now, though. I should acknowledge that.
I paw through the mess at the bottom of my closet and slink out. I don’t even have to think about my jump, I just do it and land perfectly on top of the bed, right beside Gwen. I lie down next to her thigh and rest my head on it, not saying anything, just telling her I’m here, I heard her, I’m listening to her.