how cheetah got her marks

the last few times i’ve been invited to do shrooms with new friends i’ve had to decline because over the last few years i noticed that every single time id take shrooms, id just spend the whole trip crying. 6 straight hours of just boohoohoo. I think that would ruin the trips for everyone else lmao.

today, i woke up from a dream, crying for a very silly reason. In the dream I was in line to board a plane and all along the line were people’s pets who could not join but were desperately trying to join their humans. My own dog actually worked for the airline ^^ so he was fine, but I still found myself carrying an animal in my hands and needed to get out of line to drop it off at the terminal. As I walked back I saw a tiny calico cat. It was just sitting there, hanging its head low with its tail wrapped around itself watching the people go by. When I noticed this, I exclaimed “that’s so sahaahaaaadd!” and started rubbing the tears away from my eyes as I made my way back to line.

I woke up from this dream and realized i was still making the face of a crying child.

i’m now thinking about the time when i came home from school to find a mouse caught in a trap in our new apartment on Merrifield Ln. it was a shitty spot on a high hill in a shitty city but it was our own. It was our first winter in america and my mother’s nose would bleed every time she walked me down the hill to wait for the school bus.

i saw the mouse, screamed and cried almost incessantly for hours. I was distraught for days, until my father had the brilliant idea to bring me my first pet! A hamster! close enough to a mouse I suppose. It was a good distraction, I’d forgotten about the mouse for a while.

So many more stories like this, my sister was the same way. Even worse than me maybe, she’d cry when christmas music came on cus she felt the melodies were sad.

i was too young, and too preoccupied with being a “real man” to know to cherish these traits in us both.

post script

there’s a folk tale i learned when i was younger and still obsessed with animals. Cheetahs were my absolute favorite and first obsession. The tale basically says that one day a hunter found some cheetah cubs while their mother was away, when she returned to find them missing, she cried and cried and cried for months. The constant tears mixed with the dust of her environment and permanently marked her face so that even when her cubs were returned by the disgraced hunter, her tear marks would never fade, and all her children after that would bear them too.

the story haunts me, especially when i think about my own mother.