bouby.

It’s 8:28pm on a Thursday.

A Thursday in August.

August in Boston.

I’m sitting on the couch in my living room. For the first time in weeks, it’s cool without the air conditioner on. For the first time in days, I’m not on the verge of tears.

“This will be good for you,” you told me yesterday morning, an Instagram link to another video out of Palestine sent late the night before. Before you knew I was breaking. Before you knew I was low again and couldn’t see the sky. There were a lot of things that would have been good for me yesterday morning, but this is the one you chose to give me.

I couldn’t look at it then, fearing another bloody child, another dismembered hand like a forgotten Halloween decoration tripped over in May. I knew that wouldn’t be the kind of “good for me” you’d send though. I knew and still I couldn’t look.

“What did you bring with you today?”

[You’re right – the moment the video loads, I know that. This will be good for me.]

A dusty cart. A yellow suitcase. A propane tank. A water jug.

“My cat.”

It’s like Show-and-tell. It’s like Antiques Roadshow. It’s like almost regular-old social media: a little girl, a mini-microphone, an interview on a playground.

Almost.

It’s the pink shirt that catches my attention first. It’s the bright eyes.

She looks almost happy – almost.

There’s an alertness in her that is almost childlike – almost.

There’s a confidence in her that is almost comfort – almost.

There’s the shifting in her gaze that follows and shows me the people hurrying along behind her, and I notice other things. I remember what this video has come from.

A dusty cart. A yellow suitcase. A propane tank. A water jug.

It’s hard to explain, without seeing it: the number of shapes this child’s face can take. There is a set to her mouth that is not quite the kind of smile I thought it was, the kind of smile I’m used to children having. It shifts, that mouth, so quickly it’s hard to believe that it can contain all the things it shows me.

But the true smile? The true smile.

It comes back when she talks about the cat. I didn’t notice it at first. How didn’t I notice it at first? Did I think it was a dirty blanket? A little sibling? A bag of clothes?

“What did you bring with you today?”

When the world is falling apart around her, when she has been hurried away from one danger to another, the one thing she chooses to carry is her cat. White fur, slung over this little girl’s forearms, more resigned to being carried than a cat should be. It hardly moves save to look up at the camera, look up at the girl. Another thing I notice: its fur is so much cleaner than anything else I’ve seen in these videos.

“She’s our responsibility,” she says. “If she dies, it would be our responsibility.” This child can be no older than nine. I think about what I understood about responsibility when I was nine. I wonder if responsibility, if life, is something we can simply know the value of, or if it is something burned into us. What else will she know about responsibility tomorrow? Next year? When she’s twenty-seven?

I try to watch her face as she talks. I am torn between reading the captions and reading her eyes. The woman interviewing her asks about the evacuations, and she looks away, smile shifting again, hesitating, navigating what information to give, what she can say, what she can know. Fear. Her father. A friend. Her father.

I sigh with relief when the interviewer doesn’t ask her more. When she goes back to the cat.

“Do you love your cat a lot?”

And she smiles again. Her smile is all she is when she can talk about Bouby (not Ruby, Bouby – she will be listened to. She will be understood. If only one thing is remembered from this, it will be her cat’s name).

Bouby is a good cat being held by a good girl. Bouby cannot possibly understand what her good girl has given up to keep her. Cannot possibly know how much her love might cost being held with both arms. But the will to keep the things we love alive is sometimes the biggest thing we have.

And sometimes the most important thing for us to carry is a white cat with exhaustion in its face, the only understanding it has of the world that it occupies the simple fact that it is safe right where it is.

“Do you love your cat a lot?”

“Yes. Very much. As big as the sky.”

“Do you fear her getting hurt?”

You can see it in the girl’s face – she wants to say no. She starts to shake her head. Of course not. What kind of a world would hurt her Bouby?

But she knows.

It’s the same world that would hurt her.

So yes, she’s afraid. Of course she is.

Discussion question:

How many lives can a cat hang on to in a war zone?

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https://www.instagram.com/p/C-LOWAstgFr/

Read more from mypoetmuse and project creator, Matt Cantor @Gaza_Closed_Captions