corpho

My friend, Brynn, wanted me to see her neighbor's apartment when I was over the last time. It's not really an apartment; it's a room with a bathroom, a closet, and a little sink and counter that serves as a micro-kitchenette. Before I went into the woman's room, Brynn had warned me that it would be a very shocking sight. Brynn was watching the woman's two cats while she was away at a friend's house for the holiday weekend. Brynn's little cat had often darted into this woman's room, and the woman would let Brynn walk in to retrieve the cat, without ever seeming embarrassed by the state of her living area. Brynn said it was a frightening place -- filthy to a degree that staggered the imagination. She warned me that seeing the woman's two cats in this room would break my heart, but she wanted me to bear witness to what she had seen so many times, and over which she had been agonizing. She wanted so badly to be able to remove the cats from there, but she knows that if an owner supplies enough food to sustain the animal, and there's no obvious sign of serious bodily injury, there's not much a person can do. I also said, "Well, the woman may be very disturbed, but she might also give those cats a lot of love in her own strange fashion. Maybe the cats feel contented. Do they look healthy to you since you see them fairly frequently?" She said that they did, and she had considered my angle as being possible.

But when I went into that woman's place, it was like stepping into a rat's nest of someone who was completely out of touch with the here and now. It was absolutely surreal. The woman has lived in this place for about 30 years, and it had probably never been cleaned -- EVER -- in those 30 years. There were random smears of paint everywhere, and it was all covered in a sooty grime. This woman smokes those long, brown cigarettes like a chimney, and because her place had been broken into twice in the past 30 years, she never opens her windows. She smokes in there all day and night with the windows closed, and the two cats festering in there with her. The cats came out from under the futon that was paper thin and filthier than one from a dump, and they were beautiful. One was very long and black, and he had adorable little fang tips peeking out of his lips. The other was a little cream calico that was a little more neurotic but still very sweet. The bathroom revealed a hellish scene of a toilet that looked as if tar had been poured into it, a filthy tub with no shower curtain and an eerie assortment of moldy clothes hanging over the rod, and an overflowing litter pan the size of a shoe box. To try to give me a visual of the place before I saw it, Brynn had said, "Have you seen '7'?" I guess the "sloth" scene is what she was talking about. The sink had a giant roach in it, and I thought, don't they crawl on her body at night? The grime on the windows that she never opens was so thick that it was impossible to see outside. That's the one thing that really burns me up when it comes to those cats -- the fact that they live in a tiny room with no windows to even look out of. It kills me.

Brynn said the woman's a somewhat functional human being, although, she sighs a lot and acts like her spirit's crushed. I don't know what the woman suffers from, but it's major. Being in her home felt like being inside her mind, and it was very jarring. Brynn said that the landlord must have never been in that place in 30 years, because if he had seen the state of it, he would have kicked her straight out. I'm not saying that Brynn has any desire to get the woman in trouble -- where would she and her cats go?

(I edited out some spelling mistakes....)