Susan Hathaway, my dear friend, is back from her inspirational journey to a place she insists on not revealing. She gets back home to Pandora and Zeus, her beloved and wise black cats, which seemed to be the only ones she actually missed while away. Worse than having nobody to talk to is not being able to chat with those little furry creatures, smarter than any human being could ever intend to be.
As she expected, Zeus looked at her and started purring out his feline anxiety and happiness, while Pandora sat still on the table just staring at her to reinforce her dislike for having spent all those days without her, though she made it clear she could handle it perfectly well. Pandora knew it from the bottom of her heart how needy any male cat generally was. Zeus should have given Susan a hard time at first, as Dora had previously suggested. ‘It must be his anatomy!’, she thought criticizing Z with a pinch of sarcasm.
Susan then directed her attention to staring back at Pandora to see if she would be able to somehow tell her what was going on inside her mind. She did that for exact 15 minutes and, after that, Dora turned her back to her and started staring at the ceiling, just for a change. The ceiling seemed much more interesting than Susan at that moment and Pandora really knew how to demand respect from others.
‘Having a bubble bath’… that was the image that suddenly popped into her mind. Sue went towards her bathroom, leaving all her luggage in the middle of the living room. She knew Zeus would wait for some minutes and would then sniff her bags to see if they were a safe spot for a lazy nap. That’s exactly what he did. He could smell thousands of different scents: food, animals, men, dust, smoke, perfume, cheap old cologne… he got so entertained that he couldn’t help it, he had to lie down on top of the largest bag and rest for a while. All that sniffing around made him really tired.
Water, some wine, some slow music and a home-sweet-home feeling took care of her arrival home. Not until she started feeling relaxed, did Dora jump up the bathroom doorknob to enter the room without knocking. Cats don’t knock; they simply come in as they wish. She was not very fond of water, but she loved climbing up the laundry basket (not before sharpening her claws on it, of course).
Susan knew that they were supposed to have a conversation at that moment. She turned down the music and simply looked at Dora, waiting for her to make her move. As she was looking into the cat’s eyes, she felt something quite strange happening: her body was getting numb, she was extremely drowsy, so much that she couldn’t even stand up to grab a towel and leave the tub. She felt helpless: she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t move, nor could she do anything about it. She had to surrender to Pandora’s power, as she was about to open her infamous box.
‘Little Dora, frail little thing, so cute, so tender, so vulnerable’, that’s Pandora’s look as she was gently piercing her claws onto the top of her box to get it open. You must be wondering if the cat was about to set free all evil from inside that box. Probably you got that idea from those history classes you had at school, in which you possibly dozed off and said the teacher was a bore. So you probably remember just parts of his speech and you must have never read anything really deep on that matter. Don’t worry! We are talking about different Pandora’s. Dora, the cat, is not that mythological character you are wondering about. Never mind your lack of attention during your classes. Nevermind!
Pandora opened the top of the box and just stared back at Susan, who was helplessly soaking in the bathtub. She opened her mouth, showed her fangs and made a silent threat. She looked inside the box and back to Susan, silently telling her about the previous mistakes she had made in life: how could such a powerful female, a woman, allow other people to get her down, crawling for attention, begging for being loved, drowning herself in tears because someone, generally the male kind, did something obviously unintelligent.
Susan could feel her heart pound. She could move her toes, but she was still unable of regaining control of her body. Little did she know what was about to come. Dora made a very loud noise and her tail moved as if it were the waves in high tide, incisively ferocious. At that second, she threw the box on the ground, allowing all its content to come out and be revealed. Susan had never been exposed to such a sight before. She had never been able to put together such a chain of events and feelings as Pandora decisively did, as a display of her feline honesty and truth. Out of the box came Susan’s weaknesses, her flaws, her persistent tendency to run away from her fears and let life slip away. She saw her family and every single event since the day she was born. She saw her birth and how she felt at the moment she was being dragged out of her mother’s womb. Astoundingly shocked she was: everything she had tried so hard to escape from was there, right before her eyes.
Sue was still in the bathtub, perplex, unaware of what to do from that moment on, unaware of Pandora’s intention. Dora approached her, looked at her and moved her head reaching for her hand. She was standing at the edge of the tub, just waiting for Susan to touch her. She realized that she could feel her body again and moved her hand towards the cat, struggling not to weep in desperation after having been exposed to her own worst nightmares.
Susan left the tub, dried her body and tears with the first towel she could find. She took a step towards the door in order to leave the bathroom when Pandora started walking through her kegs, purring, calling her attention so persistently that she had to kneel down and smile at her little furry thing. She was crying, filled with sorrow, confused and scared until the moment she looked at Dora’s eyes. Her eyes were calling for her. They were willing to tell her something.
It was then that she finally saw her reflexion on Pandora’s glowing yellow eyes. She looked deeper and she could feel something she had never felt before: a rush of strength, combined with courage and willingness to face life; pleasure for being alive and lively; eager for experiencing life again. ‘Come what may’, she said. ‘Never will I dare run away from what I am supposed to go through. Never will I give up my life’s history and pretend nothing ever happened. Never will I simply leave and come back to pretend I’m restarting my life. Never will I drag myself down to the point I cannot return to the surface anymore. Never, ever, ever!’
‘Meow, meow, meow’, Susan was heard a familiar relieving sound. Pandora was hungry and she could now get back to her own precious routine. Zeus heard her ask for some treats and there he was, by her side, at the speed of light, also begging for some indulgence, some delicious food to be followed by a long and relaxing cat nap.
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