I’m back home in my own bed, and I have no plans to travel again until late November. Hallelujah. I slept poorly last night, haunted by anxiety dreams and disturbed by the ambient sounds peculiar to my neighborhood that I’d forgotten about after almost a month away. I used to dream about being a “modern nomad,” living out of my suitcase and traveling the world à la Nomadic Matt, but I’m finally accepting that that lifestyle will never be a good fit for me.
In The Hound of the Baskervilles,* Dr. Watson describes Holmes as having a “cat-like love of personal cleanliness,” even when traveling. I think about that description a lot—my original Master’s thesis had a long rambling paragraph about it that ended up getting cut because it wasn’t relevant. But to have a “cat-like love of personal cleanliness” is to be more than just clean, right? It’s about the comfort of your own dominion. It’s about your chair with the butt dents and your closet full of clothing and your pillow that’s feather, not foam. I watch my cat, Maria, in her space versus an unfamiliar one and see so clearly how differently she behaves. All of her necessities—her window hammock, her cactus cat scratcher, her favorite treats—are there, and thanks to the power of Chewy, they’re the same models as the ones she has at home, and yet… She’s on edge. It’s not the same.
In a dream last night, my cat and I were in my crush’s childhood home meeting his whole family without him (so, you know, a nightmare). I spent most of the dream nightmare dodging questions about the non-existent “us” and looking for Maria under beds. The dream house was an unending maze of nautically-themed perplexity and an undisclosed menagerie of pets seemed to have staked out specific rooms as their own. An enormous Maine coon cat blinked dolefully out of a pile of pillows at me in one room. In another, an actual tiger stalked around me. In a third, lizards roamed free, sunning themselves in the windows.
The questions from the family seemed to come out of the walls themselves. I’ve never met these people and my brain seemed uninterested in conjuring up imagined bodies for them, so disembodied voices asked me questions I couldn’t answer like, “Why do you think you're good enough for my son?” “I don’t really,” I admitted, “but could you tell me where my cat is?”
I started the Writer’s Notebook as a 28-day challenge to find joy in writing again. Traditionally, a writer’s notebook is a collection of observations, reactions, ideas, questions, memories, quotes, sketches, lists, snippets of moving language, or some combination of the above. (Sometimes they’re also called Commonplace Books!) Want to join in? Leave a comment below letting me know and I’ll come check out your work!