It was raining really hard and it was pitch dark. The park was empty. The dogs had scooted out and were sleeping in the cabanas outside the park and I was there because - well, you do some things to feel alive. But I started feeling afraid before I started feeling alive.
The lake was grey, placid, and menacing. I could see outlines of frogs of all sizes hopping about, the trees and the marsh was overrun with trees, bushes, and leaves and branches that looked more muscular than I remembered them. The fishermen weren't there so there were no reassuring sightings of the net or warm light from the lanterns. There was one streetlamp that was flickering. Clouds of mosquitoes whizzed strong. From a distance, they actually looked like pretty winged constellation. The mud squelched. My stomach was a litte tight. Mouth a little dry. Increased the volume of the music I was listening to. Walked forward towards the boggy darkness. Walked into it.
There's a stretch that is as menacing as it is wondrous. I have spotted fireflies there after the COVID. I have also spotted insanely beautiful white flowers, so beautiful that something deep iside warns you that they must be poisonous. The trees and bushes there cloak a spot of the marsh where empty boats stay still. They are usually untethered but they go nowhere.
I generally don't feel unsafe there. As in I am no afraid of robbers or men acting up. But I always sense that soething in those bushes, deep into the marsh, something has eyes and it follows me. It was so dark that I wondered about panthers prowling there. What would I do if one of them just sauntered across me and blocked my way. What if I looked up and against the rainy sky I spotted the shadow of a Big Cat on a branch. I don't know if I had psyched myself but I started smelling something - wet, meaty, predatorial. (I realise as I wrote that that it is sexual and that very well may be the appeal of what else this description could apply to.) But it was the silence that was scary. Sure there were sounds. Rain was pouring down, someone on my mobile was trilling away, I was panting, frogs croaked...and yet something else was there. I really thought that something is going to walk out of the dark bushes. Walk out. Not creep out. Like this would be a meeting we had planned for and I had consciously forgotten but my sub-conscious remembered. Maybe this deep tangle of memory and instinct is what we call destiny.
Nothing happened though. I finished my walk. I got home. Was feeling feverish with relief. Ate something and slept after working for a few solid hours.
Woke up to a strange sense of someone watching me.
Outside the window was a pitch black cat. With eyes that seemed to recognize.
I dislike cats immensely and stuff like this is no way for me to feel any stirrings of love.
Yet, the way it looked. No, not looked. The way it saw.
The black cat (or any cat) totem in shamanism stands for intuition. The stuff you meet when you go through the dark, I guess.
Before the dark becomes a portal, it is a mirror. And you see something you don't recognize.
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