Escapism

It had become a habit to wander around the abandoned districts of my hometown anytime my mind began to race with intrusive thoughts. This place was slowly becoming a shell of what it used to be. It was like exploring a ghost town; it gave me this feeling of adventure masked as a sense of purpose. There were no footsteps to follow, no prying eyes watching my every move. When I walked through these broken streets, I felt calm. Perhaps I was romanticising the idea of being the only person left on Earth by walking through the abandoned streets, like being alone was the only solution to my problems. I wanted to escape; I just did not know where to.

I found a dilapidated barn the other week, which was strange since it was hidden behind four tall brick walls in the middle of the old town. I could only see the back of it through the crumbling cracks between the bricks. Anyway, I only entered the accessible buildings. It was far too much effort to try and break into structures with boarded up windows and chains locked across their doors. I just wanted to observe. Inside most ruined buildings would be the littered evidence of humans. Mattresses, broken bottles, ragged clothes, graffiti, needles; everything but actual people. Sometimes, I saw the odd cat running across the road; they would always stop to stare at me, gauging if I posed a threat to their existence. We would lock eyes before they would dash away. After some time walking around this area, I began to recognise one cat in particular. A black cat with a white spot in the centre of its forehead. It was more fearless than the others; there were times where I noticed it following me in and out of devoid homes. I tried to approach it once, but it hissed at me and disappeared through the cracks of the brick wall. I left it alone whenever it came to observe me after that.

There was one day where my anxieties played my mind like a piano, using my heart as its metronome and hitting key after key towards a bitter crescendo. I’d seen this show before. And like I usually did, I went for a walk. You can’t run away from the music in your head, but I liked to think I could try. I was walking down Magnolia Street when the numbness hit. My head suddenly emptied, and white noise filled my ears. Was it a cure? Maybe more of a coping mechanism, but it worked. I watched the world continue to spin while I froze in time.

I wondered if anything was real. What if life was nothing but the fever dream of a terminally delirious alien being projected as a hologram for other aliens to enjoy? I sat on the curb of the road, attempting to comprehend the world as I knew it. Why this world was falling apart, and how existence felt more like a burden than a privilege. It was a complexly simple existence, but what could I do? I had no control; the only settling thought I could think of was to pretend that humans didn’t exist.

While blankly gazing at my surroundings, I spotted the black cat staring at me from across the road. Maybe it was my imagination, but I swore that the spot on its forehead was a third eye piercing through me. But before I could get a good look, it turned away and ran down the pavement. Every part of me suddenly wanted to follow this cat. It always followed me around, so this was only fair. It slinked under abandoned cars, dashing away when I came close enough. Eventually, it scaled a familiar brick wall, and I couldn’t go any further. I looked around to see if I could find a gate; instead, I saw a pile of wooden pallets stacked high against the wall. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution until I found myself on the other side without a means of getting back. The cat had watched me chase it over the wall and stopped trying to run away. But rather, it was looking at me like I was mad. Maybe I was. I was chasing a cat.

We were staring at each other, and now that I had a closer look at the cat, I could see that its white spot was just a spot. I quickly realised where I was as I noticed the barn in front of me. It was more broken down than I had thought, looking like the shedding skeleton of what was once a sturdy structure. The cat made its way inside the barn through one of the many gaping holes in its walls. The barn doors were chained shut like most of the buildings, but the chains didn’t matter with so many openings. I ducked through one of the bigger holes and looked for the cat. But it had disappeared. Inside the barn’s frame were rotting rafters and trodden down straw with sunlight flowing through its scarce roof. I meandered along its perimeter, stepping over tattered fallen planks.

Then, the white noise in my ears stopped humming. It left me in a haunting silence I rarely experienced. A fleeting moment of bliss before my ears began picking up sounds again. I could hear a siren wailing somewhere far away from me and took it as a sign to start heading home. Exiting through the same hole, I circled around the barn to where I had looked through a crack in the bricks. Something white flashed behind the tears in the wall, so I peered through to see what looked like a migrating herd of hundreds of white cats running along the pavement, only to disappear as quickly as they had appeared. I wandered along the wall until I found an iron gate. Chained, of course. After somehow managing to grapple over the top of the gate, I recognised where I was and made my way home.

I got to the main road and noticed an immediate lack of people; I expected to see at least one person out during lunchtime, but it was as if it were becoming a part of the abandoned districts. I realised there was a black and white cat trotting towards me, meowing over and over. It didn’t acknowledge me as it strolled past, but I could have sworn I spotted a Bluetooth headset poking from its ear. My confusion began to bubble, but I shrugged it off and kept walking. Behind me, I could hear the rumble of a car’s engine approach me; I turned to see a red sportscar go screaming along the road, but not without seeing an orange tabby cat sat behind the wheel. Had I really just seen a cat driving? I turned to look at my reflection in the shop window of a bakery, rubbing my eyes red as I struggled to recognise myself. Then, my focus shifted through the glass to see another cat stood at the counter wearing a frilled apron, kneading actual bread dough. I couldn’t believe it! The baking cat spotted me gawking and meowed, gesturing its doughy paw at me to come in. What was actually happening? While backing away from the window, I didn’t see the calico sat in behind me when I stood on its tail. Its yowl made the both of us jump; it then hissed at me and ran away. But why was it wearing a handbag? Things were getting far too weird, so I decided to run too. The more of these anthropomorphic cats I witnessed replacing humans, the more I wanted to escape this fever dream of an experience. I couldn’t tell what was real.

I had been stumbling around this cat town for nearly an hour, seeing every colour and breed of cat imaginable. The shock was beginning to die down as my supposed hallucination dragged out indefinitely. How was I supposed to stop this? Each cat I saw started to irk me, so maybe the abandoned district would serve me some peace for a moment.

I was back down Magnolia Road, and with not a cat in sight, I let out a sigh of relief. Some time to think about what was going on might be just what I needed. My aimless wandering brought me to the iron gates enclosing the barn. Its chains sat strong in their lock, but my mind told me that the barn was the only place to think clearly. Scaling the gate wasn’t any easier the second time. In fact, it was worse because I was still in a weird state of shock., but I managed to clear it and tumble down onto the inner grounds. The barn called me inside its shell to enjoy the tranquillity. The sun was still beaming through the holey ceiling breathing warm rays across my skin. If I had known it wouldn’t last, I would have enjoyed it more.

“So? What do you think of a world without humans?” A soft voice that definitely wasn’t mine echoed through my brain. I turned drastically from side to side, hoping to spot who was talking to me. Then I looked behind me and froze. Suddenly, there was a ginormous black cat sat in a loaf, observing me freak out. I quickly realised it that the black cat from before, except, much, much bigger. And it seemed as though I had been right about its third eye. The cat stared at me with three big eyes and asked me again. “Come on. A world without humans?”

“It’s bizarre.” Was all I could produce. The cat looked somewhat offended.

“I took pity on you, wishing you could run away from your humans. So I bought you to my realm where only felines exist. Humans call it an alternative universe, I believe?” The cat’s mouth never moved; every word it spoke was telepathically said inside my mind. Logically, things just seemed to be getting worse.

“I didn’t ask you to bring me here!” I was arguing with a giant cat. “I was just trying to calm down and walk around for a while!”

“What’s so bad about your world anyway? You have some problems; fix them.”

“It’s not that simple!” I wasn’t sure whether I should be discussing politics with a cat, but I guessed that was where I was headed. “People like me have no control! The world is owned by corrupt politicians, elitist billionaires, and sleazy social media companies, all leeching from this planet more than it can give! Human existence could wipe itself out in my lifetime, and all I can do is watch!”

“That is just a problem that needs to be fixed; why can’t you fix it?”

“I’m a powerless nothing compared to them!” The cat simply stared at me for what felt like a stretched moment of judgement.

“Humans are so stupid. If you do not like, change it. Doing nothing makes your lives more miserable.” Its solution to world issues sounded like a scam but hearing that from a colossal cat wasn’t the strangest thing I’d seen that day.

“Just send me back; it’s so weird here!” I pleaded with the psychic cat. Its eyes narrow at me.

“Cats fix what they don’t like. You will be happier when you do the same.” We stared into each other’s eyes, and I couldn’t help but nod. The cat nodded back, and suddenly I could hear a hum of white noise filling my ears. The sound irritated my ears, and I shook my head. But when my vision focused once more, the cat was gone.

Suddenly I was alone again. The white noise stopped, and the sounds surrounding me began to fade in again. A siren echoed in the distance. The world felt different from before. Was it a sense of purpose I was mistaken for a need of adventure?