32 Days of Christmas: Day 11
I saw one today, a bruised cat. Those orange, thin, and defiant cats, stalking a thicket below my balcony. His nose was scratched, one eye swollen and barely open: badges of some battle he’d been in recently. Why do stray cats always have bruised noses? Makes me wonder what goes on in the cat underworld.
Cats are not the bravest of animals, but their aura when stalking prey is admirable. They move in a way that suggests they’ve survived things I couldn’t begin to imagine. Especially bruised cats who walk with a limp.
My Wednesday was slow. After finishing my exams for the year all that is left now is to dance to traditional tunes and watch stray cats stalk prey in thickets below. Cats are so deliberate; every step has a swagger, every twitch of the ear is diligent. Even my rustling way above on my balcony captured his slight attention, but then he got back to stalking whatever it was he was stalking.
Wednesday doesn’t seem like a day for misfits. It doesn’t seem like a day for bruised cats or idle youths. Its afternoons are slow, almost boring. The sun is too bright for any seriousness and the city feels like it’s suspended between meaning and nothing at all. Wednesdays are not dramatic. They’re not the loud beginning of something, like Mondays, nor the triumphant end, like Fridays. They’re not romantic, like weekends, nor leisurely, like Sundays. Wednesdays are quiet, steady, slightly bruised days—the stray cats of the week.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved them. They ask nothing of me except to continue. They don’t promise joy or threaten disaster; they just hum in the background, offering a kind of neutral ground where you can think, or not think, without consequence.
The problem of having a cool, chill day like Wednesday being your favorite day is that anything out of the ordinary sticks forever in your conscience. Like the one Wednesday years ago, when everything was still in black and white, when words left my mouth that I didn’t authorize: If you’re going to cheat on me, at least don’t do it on a Wednesday. I like Wednesday.
It wasn’t the betrayal itself that startled me; life is full of people who forget their vows or misplace their loyalties. What astonished me was the timing. To bruise a Wednesday felt almost sacred in its cruelty, like kicking a cat already limping from its own private war.
But over the years I’ve learnt that betrayal has a peculiar rhythm; it doesn’t arrive with warning bells. It slips in slowly, subtle at first, chilling later. When I found out, the world did not collapse. Instead everything shifted a few degrees off-center, like when you look at a familiar street and suddenly realize a building you passed a thousand times has always leaned slightly, but you never noticed. I remember walking outside in a daze, the town moving around me in its usual choreography. And then, as if delivered for emotional punctuation, a stray cat darted across my path, this time a grey fat one, but also with a bruised nose. I wondered whether he too had been betrayed. Whether his wounded face was the result of trusting someone he shouldn’t have, or whether he had simply run into the wrong thicket on the wrong Wednesday.
Years later Wednesdays have become my small altars of recovery. I wake up with no expectation except to pay attention. I watch things I once dismissed: a neighbor sweeping her kibanda; a child dragging a backpack twice their size; a man smoking under a tree like he’s in conversation with the sky. And always, the cats. The bruised-nosed sentinels of the streets whose injuries aren’t signs of defeat but of survival. Of proof that they fought for scraps, territories, lovers, or dreams. Proof that even in worlds I don’t understand, living takes work. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about them. Maybe it’s why my heart feels a little less heavy each time I see one stare back at me with that unapologetic, unpolished resilience.
✍🏽Reagan.