The girl and the cat with short souls

Before my Tatay died, I jokingly told him not to haunt me in my sleep. He laughed then, still capable of the words, “indi ah,” a few weeks before his spinal injury replaced his voice with grunts and labored breathing.

He knew I was easily scared, even though I often asked him for horror stories on random nights. The kapre of the neighborhood asking for a smoke. A solemn all-white parade in the middle of the woods long past midnight. The occasional tiktik visits. I curled up on the sofa, partly fascinated by his memories (or drunken tales) coming to life. I found refuge beside his tall form on the banig as we listened to sightings of “Maria Labo” on the radio. An only child cocooned by aswang slayers, my monsters in the dark never stood a chance, melting into oblivion with Tatay’s snoring.

When I was young, they described me as “manubo ang dungan.” For the Ilonggos, this refers to willpower, strength, sometimes akin to soul. An aswang tried to eat me when I was a baby, its long tongue reportedly snaking through layers of nipa and musketero to grab me until Tatay pierced the hut with a binangon. A heavy thud landed outside, black pig scrambling out of view before Tatay and Nanay’s siblings could get to it. Madasig ako mausog (I get sick quickly). I had to fight off what seemed like perpetual asthma until they had to bring me to an albularyo para butungon akon dungan. To stretch it. Give me some kind of defense.

I used to think that my stretched dungan prevented me from seeing Tatay again. When I started forgetting the specific indentations of his 62-year-old face, I begged the night to make me dream of him. My prayer was granted five years later, in my second year of college.

Every death that passes through our time on Earth is different. There are lives that you knew you would just outlive. Dani was a five-year-old community cat under the care of Cats of Eton Centris. I was a dog person growing up, but daily cat exposure in your workplace is bound to develop one’s innate feline affinity. She was not my first choice, but the urgency of her condition made me take her in. She had feline immunodeficiency virus, or what was commonly termed HIV for cats. Like me, she had a whack dungan, and this must be why the cat distribution system matched the two of us.

Dani smelled of sunshine and had a lust for outdoor walks and plant-smelling adventures. She was cunning, playing the best of her features to get the best privileges, like the largest chunks of fish from my partner’s mother who doesn’t like cats but loved her tremendously, so much so that she would take out all the bones first: “Ipaghihimay ko si Dani.” She had the most beautiful eyes, turquoise or teal or emerald, depending on the angle of the rays, reminding me forever of the ocean where everything ebbs and flows, and yet the waves come back over and over to shape their shores’ contours. Of our four indoor cats, she had the sole privilege of lying on top of my head or splayed across our chests, purring in time with our heartbeats. This was good, we assumed, the boundless shower of love and daily habits of care would be enough to stretch her dungan.

I thought I could plan out death in which Dani would be 16 years old, frail but sharp-eyed still as ever. I wanted to bask in the sun with her throughout the day, take her on a nice walk where she could nibble on her favorite grass, and show the ocean where sea glasses are the color of her eyes. She could fade then and there with proper goodbyes. But grief, faithful in its cruelty, found me while I was on the tail-end of a Christmas vacation, a day before my partner and I were scheduled to fly home.

Since then, Dani hasn’t shown up in my dreams. I begged for feline apparitions under the bed, ghost zoomies at two in the morning, or an unexplainable weight in my chest. I pleaded the nights for a haunting, for my dungan to come loose so she could visit me. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, I keep my grief company with occasional photos and videos of her, keeping close the remnants of what was once tangible.

Perhaps what I wasn’t willing to confront, even now, was the full vulnerability that came with grieving, the callous rawness of it that would strip my dungan, exposing my soul to the most primal pain of my failure to keep her safe and warm and able to live out the most of her years. It means facing the ghosts of cutting corners of her annual check-ups and laboratories, of denying her the bedtime cuddles because we were too busy to care and didn’t tomorrows always hold the promise of next time, getting angry at the littlest things she had no knowledge of and were entirely played by humans’ hands. Regrets and guilt and what-ifs—my purest fears. There’s a certain kind of bravery in surrendering to these three monsters, letting them consume me, and coming out the other end a person accepting of all my faults.

I think of dreams as places of reunions, conjured simply because of longing. I hope Dani waits for me in these spaces of “almosts” as I work on forgiving myself, but this is a small thing to ask for creatures whose nature is to love unconditionally. When we meet again, I know moments will fade save for that residual sensation of loving and losing and remembering—all at once a haunting of motions of life.

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Aya Minerva, 29, is a “pawrent” to five rescued “puspins.” She loves reading, taking nature walks, and drinking coffee.