On Insignificance

As we bombed Iran, my cat got out. On TVs in the cantinas and fondas of Mexico City, the war reels played: Iran, Israel, United States, nuclear threat. Blockades, Palestinians, Gaza, mass starvation. Stateside, shaky footage of ICE officers razing entire communities to the ground. In my new home in Mexico, behind suited men serving orange slices and mezcal, behind swishing plates of chilaquiles and blue corn tortillas, the broadcasts showed my country once again suffocating the world, snuffing it out, shattering people and places into oblivion. And I was worried about Fidel.

It occurred to me that he had left in anticipation—a sort of fleeing before the end times. It occurred to me that he could detect this final ebb, that he could understand something barely registered at the edge of my consciousness. His absence was the blank future chilling me cold. I had expected to watch him grow for two decades, and after only one year he was gone. I couldn’t help but draw parallels to the present and looming disasters that shouted from every newspaper stand lining the streets of Santa María la Ribera. My privileged perch presiding over the life of something I loved was replaced by a front-seat view into the abyss.

I had never been a cat person. After growing up with dogs, I found cats to be standoffish and almost cruelly apathetic. I didn’t see the point of caring for an animal that would not reciprocate my attention, and I had only ever met cats that were at worst aggressive and at best indifferent. I feigned doting over my friends’ cats while harboring a thinly-veiled disdain for them. So it was a surprise to everyone, perhaps to me most of all, when I decided to adopt Fidel.

At first, we didn’t understand each other. For the first months of his life, I thought he was female (until, surprise, the vet told me otherwise—on the day of Mexico’s Pride celebration, no less). He was wary of my comparatively massive body, and I was terrified of his animal instincts. Would he bolt? Would he hide? Would he lash out at a moment’s notice? But little by little, in the year that followed, we created a language together. Unintentionally I learned how to register each of his vocalizations and know what they meant, and he could respond to my cues, make me laugh, curl onto my lap when I was sad. I cared for him, and I learned that taking care of something is perhaps the purest expression of love there is. In return, he provided me with his humorous and affectionate company.

I was on vacation when my fiancé told me that Fidel had gotten out and couldn’t be found. Suddenly the beautiful places I was seeing and the warmth of my friends’ presence became imperceptible. My generally anxious demeanor bled into moments of panic. I began looking for him the minute I arrived home.

…

My days revolved around searching. I scoured the internet for tips; I called all of the vets in our area; I posted online; I put up and passed out over a hundred flyers. I bought a humane trap and placed his food in it as bait. In the mornings and at night I crouched down to look under cars with my flashlight, hoping to see two dots shining back at me.

Raised Catholic, I naturally began my search each day at dawn with a prayer to St. Anthony. Having distanced myself from the church, I did not know if this was appropriate. I had not had regular correspondence with St. Anthony or his colleagues since high school. It seemed almost impertinent to turn to him now, in a time of desperation, when I had rebuffed him and his fraternity for my entire adult life. But I nonetheless reopened our line of communication, hoping that my appeals would be heard and that somehow Fidel would appear outside my door.

As the week went on, I began to feel more and more desperate. One day, while tearing up over coffee with a close friend, I confessed that I felt exhausted and at a loss.

“I’ve been looking this up,” she said. “Have you tried asking street cats for help?”

My confused look answered for me. She explained that, according to Japanese legend, an effective method for finding lost cats is to converse with strays. You talk to them as though they were humans, asking them to pass on the message that your cat is loved and needed at home.

I thought it over. It seemed unreasonable. It also didn’t seem like that much more of a stretch than asking a dead guy from the thirteenth century for help.

In the days that followed, with no sign of Fidel, I felt myself spiraling into a familiar feeling of depression and self-directed anger. I started to berate myself over the tiniest things. I’d wake up at five a.m., my heart pounding against my chest. I completely lost my appetite. I taped flyers to telephone poles and lamp posts with a devastating feeling of futility. As I made my way home, dozens of his photocopied eyes peered back at me.

“If you see Fidel, tell him to come home,” I said to a gray-and-white cat fanned out on the sidewalk. She blinked long and slow. I took this to mean that she would.

…

The post-COVID world had pushed me indoors. For the past four years I have worked from home. This has rendered me skittish in conversations with strangers or in new social settings: I had grown accustomed to the world being predominantly in my head or on the news, stepping foot outside only for an occasional evening errand or outing with friends. I was still spending most of my time in my apartment. Like Fidel, whose physical environment consisted solely of my sofas and bedspreads, I was beginning to experience my domestic life as the bulk of my life.

This made it embarrassing to leave the house several times a day to search for him. I didn’t know how to present myself or my plight. I felt awkward approaching strangers and neighbors to ask for help; I was painfully conscious of my own voice, my body, my presence intruding upon their days. It reminded me of when I had gone campaigning in the past—but at least then I was advocating for political leaders I believed would make a difference. I’d gone door to door in labyrinthian Brooklyn apartment complexes, engaging in impassioned discourse about the importance of healthcare for all and secure public housing. Now I was just a woman looking for her cat. This could not be less important for the world, I thought as I handed vendors and neighbors my half-sheet with Fidel’s picture and my phone number. Yet every night that I went home without him, I sobbed myself to sleep.

How can we justify minute losses in the context of global disaster? How could I worry about Fidel when entire peoples were being destroyed, entire families eliminated? Since 2023 I had felt gripped with paralysis in the escalation of the Palestinian genocide. I had gone to marches, I had put up posters, but the unceasing minutiae of my daily life surged absurdly forward. I traveled; I got engaged; my partner and I began planning our wedding. My moments of intense joy seemed grotesque when I watched the news, just as the disappearance of Fidel felt both excruciating and unimportant.

And if his loss, something that tightened my chest in panic, was unimportant, then wasn’t I as well? Quickly I fell into a pit of self-hatred. I wanted to get out of my head, my skin. I felt that I didn’t deserve to be sad, yet I was. Therefore I didn’t deserve to feel better, so why try?

It was a steep escalation into my own private disaster, my calamity of insignificance.

…

“I lost my own gatita to heaven not long ago,” said the hair stylist with a dark red perm as she put my flyer up on her wall. “I hope you find him, m’ija.”

“Try looking in the field near the school, guerita,” said the lady who ran the pambazo stand a street over. “He might be there, guerita, if you come back at night.”

“Put your flyer on the post there,” said the woman who ran the fruit stand as she covered a mango in chamoy. “We’ll keep an eye out.”

“I lost my cat for two weeks once,” said the pet store vendor. “Don’t stop looking.”

“Fidel, right?” a stranger asked as I approached him saying I was looking for a cat. “I’ve seen your posters; I hope you find him soon.”

“I saw a black cat a street over,” said a neighbor. “I called out to him, but he walked away.”

“We’ll look for him,” said the stoned teenage boys outside the ice cream shop.

“Fidel. Same name as my brother.”

“Fidel. Black cat.”

“Fidel.”

“I hope you find him.”

“Don’t give up.”

“He’ll come home.”

“Good luck.”

“No pierdas la fe,” said the maintenance lady of our building each morning as I set out to search at dawn.

…

I first began to entertain the idea of my own irrelevance in college. I was recovering from that selfish adolescent fever of worrying almost exclusively about myself, my future, my university acceptances. Little by little, the telescope I had trained inward was shifting its view. Like many of my classmates, I was learning for the first time about my positioning in the world. I was inundated with buzzwords about privilege and power. I thought I understood them. I thought myself a conscious and politically correct world citizen.

A year after graduating, while living in Brooklyn, I began to participate in discussion groups and campaigns for local politicians. I found myself speaking to a native New Yorker about gentrification, about how I, as someone who was not from the city, was to blame for skyrocketing rents that were pricing people out of their family homes.

“But you’re not,” she said bluntly. “It’s not about you.”

Wham. With those two sentences, years of trained shame and guilt began to unravel inside me. She was right. The cause of the problem was not about me, just as the solution was not for me. I was not accountable for this act of oppression, nor was I, in this case, oppressed by it.

It goes without saying that a political and economic system that feeds off human misery and despair, off instability and unemployment, stands to benefit from us as individuals shouldering the responsibility for centuries of past violence and future disaster. It’s useful for them if I think that climate change is my fault because I used a plastic straw, while the coffee chain that provides it continues to exploit workers worldwide and emit fossil fuels with minimal oversight or regulation. My use of a straw does not matter. In this equation and countless others, I do not matter.

It goes without saying that a political and economic system that feeds off human misery and despair, off instability and unemployment, stands to benefit from us as individuals shouldering the responsibility for centuries of past violence and future disaster.

Perhaps, then, being insignificant is nothing to be ashamed of. Perhaps it is something worth appreciating, if not embracing. I don’t mean to assume a posture of nihilism. If anything, recognizing my lack of responsibility for capitalism’s ills has motivated me more than ever to fight it. I am no longer pushed by a sense of guilt, but rather by a vision of what our society could be. I can and still should work towards that vision while being a custodian of my tiny corner of the world.

And even then, if we’re being honest, the majority of my time will be spent occupied with trivialities. I gossip with friends; I shop for my favorite cereal; I search for my runaway cat. In the context of global catastrophe, all that is absurd. It’s also the substance of these days that I’m stringing into my small life.

…

This essay is not about anything of importance. It cannot pull the missiles back into their sheaths; it cannot fill empty stomachs; it cannot unlock prison cell doors. It’s not even trying. It’s about cats, and those who look for them.

I’ve now heard countless stories of people who’ve searched high and low, who’ve ventured out on the darkest of nights to look for their cats. Sometimes they’re found; sometimes they’re gone forever. In the scheme of things, a lost cat isn’t much. But if Fidel’s leaving is a symptom of the end times, then what I’ve found in his absence is the optimism that we are capable of comradery and indefatigable love.

I still haven’t found Fidel. I wrote this piece in the past tense with the hope that, by the time I finished it, he’d be home and I’d have my conclusion. He isn’t; I don’t. Our strange odyssey continues. Tomorrow we will go to the bodega down the street where they store losing lottery tickets. We will hope to find luck in a place where luck goes to die.

In looking for him, though, I’ve reentered the human and celestial worlds. I leave my house each morning and say hello to my neighbors. Strangers ask how I’m doing and if I’ve found him yet. Before this massive metropolis wakes up, I pass street vendors just beginning to prepare their tortas and juices. The city streets smell of oranges. I speak to strays and saints. I see the day’s first breath on the mountains. I am insignificant. But I’m here anyway.