I’m A Cat

Uh huh, that four-legged feline that meows. A Siamese, to be specific. Brown, with a beige fur coat, big blue eyes… the whole nine yards. At least, that’s what my mom and dad told me.

If you’re one of those who believe in reincarnation, then I was a cat in my past life. My mom, an actress, and my dad, a screenwriter, were perfectly happy focusing on their careers and didn’t want any children. One of the main reasons that encouraged their being together was that very solid agreement. They had their whole lives and careers ahead of them… nothing was supposed to come in the way.

It happened on one cold day, when they found “Bos-Bos” on the street. She was as tiny as they get and freezing in the dark. There was no way they were going to leave her there. She was my parents’ first pet and it felt like their own bundle of joy. You know Queen’s song? “Too much love will kill you”? It’s so insightful, because too much love is exactly what killed Bos-Bos.

One Eid, Bos-Bos caught a fever, and her vet was out of town. My parents made the irrational decision of taking their baby to “El Sha3b” hospital, a governmental animal hospital. The result: Bos-Bos was infected with deadly Virus C. In a matter of months, she shrank to the size of a palm and had to be taken to the vet on a daily basis for glucose and medication.

One night, Bos-Bos struggled to get up on the bed and moved slowly towards my father. She wrapped herself around his head and neck, then started purring till they both fell asleep.

She was dead in the morning.

My father is a very proud Egyptian and takes even greater pride in the Pharaonic heritage. So he picked up his favorite shirt and wrapped Bos-Bos up in it. He went along with my mom to the Giza Pyramids area and buried their baby right in front of Khufu (The Great Pyramid).

The sadness was overwhelming as Bos-Bos was kind of the first loved one that both my parents experienced losing. Less than a month later, when my mom was at the peak of her career, she received the bad news… Me! Yes, I was the worst news she could’ve received. Her career was finally jump starting. Her dream was so close; she could almost touch it, then BAM! Nothing but dust in the wind.

Of course, her instant decision was an abortion, but to her surprise, my dad was ecstatic and said, “If God wants so, then it is so” and the war was officially on between her and me. As she was crying, shaking and despising the thought of me, I was getting too comfortable inside of her and hanging on tightly to dear life.

The nine months of my creation were her hell on earth. She felt betrayed by everyone, especially by her significant other. He could hardly wait for my arrival, as she was dreading the day she would have to lay her eyes on me. She tried to look at the positive side, having a boy of her own! How cool would that be? My mom came from a family who worshiped their sons, and she wanted to know what that was like!

Her misery continued, until my day was finally here and I couldn’t wait to get out. When my mom awoke from the anesthesia and was told her baby was a girl, all she did was curl up in bed and wished she would die. The nurses thought that bringing me to her would calm her down and put everything in perspective, but an even bigger bomb was dropped… As the nurse handed me to my mom, her jaw dropped as she screamed “A girl AND CROSS-EYED”?

“Uh oh”, I thought to myself. But I didn’t need to worry for long, because the next day, my doctor found out I had jaundice and all that hatred and resentment were magically turned into adoration and anxiety. She cried her eyes out in fear that anything bad would happen to me. She couldn’t get enough of me and never had a chance to comprehend how and when it hit her; she had fallen helplessly under my spell.

My mom and dad wrapped me up and took me home. They told each other that I was Bos-Bos, sent to them in another form, a better one…

“It is a secret of the world that all things subsist and so not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again… Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.” – Emerson