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Youth now (if it’s still there) or 22 years ago would ride (have ridden) the subway all the way from 116th Street to 225th Street in Manhattan to look in a pet shop window, but 22 years ago, when I was 20 and into the idea that thinking about death is a passage to thinking about birth, I did. The truth is, I rode all that way to see a friend, and on the way to her apartment stumbled upon the shop. And yet substituting the shop for her apartment feels, even outside my mind, like the actual truth. In a small container lay a litter of kittens reduced to one who looked through its blindness at another person who, like me, had stopped to see it nudge and maneuver within a phantom mass of bodies an unknown distance from their mother’s belly. To clarify, it was me it alone looked at. And also it looked at everything around and above me— the elevated subway tracks, the pill bottle stopped right at the edge of the gutter, the half-filled, see-through, cage-like metal garbage can—as they drifted through the glass into the heaving body, its mouth and bones sizing up and doing the trick of refusing (for now) great gulps of air…this image simply can’t be clarified. Standing there, I was as close to the object of pity and love as the sensations of pity and love can ever be. Even worse than sentimentality is dispassion, and if I could have stood on middle ground, I would have. Someone not exactly me, given that I had experienced it myself, doubted such a thing as a good home, while the whole me had (has now) a vision not of hope, but of something larger we may live inside.
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