A Strange Space

It was June 21. A Sunday. A strange news day, my bureau chief had warned. And he was right, of course.

It began as just another news day, it was the day I learned that time-worn folktale, that D.C. is built on a swamp. The air was damp and moist and the sky went from clear to plump—thick and opaque nimbus clouds stretched their wispy fingertips and grazed me with soft pokes and prods in what seemed like a matter of minutes.

I was tired.

I was walking the two miles from American University to a local cat café. This was the cat café’s second day, and the line outside showed it.

I was supposed to meet the owner. I was supposed to have arrived at 9:00 a.m., 15 minutes earlier, for our scheduled interview. I was supposed to wait in line, probably. I didn’t. There were frowns, I remember. And a few clucking tongues.

By the time I successfully sidestepped the growing swarm of customers, I’d found the 24-year-old entrepreneur I’d been looking for. And after we embraced I saw that her shirt announced “The Time Is Meow.” She saw me grin and said, “how funny. Because you’re with TIME Magazine.” I learned that she was previously an investment banker whose gap year had entailed the realization that making money could be fulfilling, too.

She had a small lisp, which made it difficult to hear her clearly. We reached a compromise, which made me, effectively, her shadow: I observed—loitered, lingered, this time, at the side.

I watched her at once pet a one-eyed cat and reward a customer with a plush pillow stitched, in flowery print, with the phrase “Le Chat.” I felt out of place that Sunday. Out of place because I was occupying someone else’s space and crossing the not so visible line between the world within my head and the sometimes disappointing one outside my flesh.

I felt out of place mostly, though, because of what I heard in this place.

It was all so intimate.

I picked apart conversations I overheard as if the words were spools of yarn.

I met a couple in front of me who held a battered menu and spoke loudly about their least favorite beverage category, “Cat Colada.” “Doesn’t even rhyme with piña.”

I met a girl experimenting with her sexuality whose red basketball shorts stretched past her knees towards her mud-streaked Jordan’s. “Felines remind me of femininity.”

I met another café owner, located just across the street, who “majored in Mediterranean food and minored in revolutions”. He was dressed in a UPS uniform that was grease-stained at the sleeve, and smoked close to ten cigarettes in between congested heaves. “My mother used to hand feed strays in Iran.”

She was killed by a bomb in 1979.

I met strangers whose names and faces I forgot by the day’s end, but whose stories loitered and lingered in my memory. “Is proof a prerequisite for existence?”

I hope not.

I asked so many questions that Sunday, questions whose answers I learned were placeholders at best. Questions that couldn’t be answered, or didn’t need to be answered, because what mattered most was that they were being answered at all.

I met so many strangers and heard so many stories, and I suppose I should have expected this. I was, after all, working a journalism internship.

But I certainly didn’t expect how willing these strangers would be to let me become privy into what I can only assume were otherwise undisclosed admissions of vulnerability.

I didn’t expect, either, how hard it would be. To not include these stories into the story that appeared in print. The one with the tight nutgraf. And interspersed quotes. And an overarching theme.

I didn’t expect to want to read and write these stories more. The ones on the periphery. The ones that loiter and linger. The ones that overlap and interact and sustain the plot of another story.

The one about the investment banker who, feeling unfulfilled, opened up a strange place filled with strange cats and even stranger news.

Aisha Y. Bhoori, ’18, lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.