Bandwagon #9
Spar, ShopRite and the other places we think of important stuff.
Laura’s cat had 9 lives, she definitely did not. Well, supposedly had nine lives. It was one of those random thoughts that popped in her head once in a while. You know, sort of like those ones that pop in yours as well. What will happen if you put your finger in the blue furnace from the cooker, or what goes inside a computer. Those kinds.
The thought came when she was at the store trying to buy cat food for her baby, Beyonce. It was her baby and she had the right to name him whatever she wanted. That was her response to anyone who asked why she had given her Lykoi, that name. It was one of the few things she did not care about people’s opinions on. These kind of petty matters. But in her own life, she knew that she cared an unhealthy amount what other people had to say. What they would think about her posts on social media, if they knew the kind of person she really was. If her colleagues thought she was lazy because of that one incident last week or if that girl she greeted at the entrance of the supermarket thought of her as rude because her smile was incomplete. Laura knew that all these were irrelevant and yet couldn’t stop wondering how other people saw her.
Beyonce had the priviledge of doing that. She could worry for six of her lives, consistently and intentionally make wrong choices in the next two, and then do what was right and simply not care about others’ opinions in the ninth. You know, make the ninth the one for truly living. A grand finale of sorts, to her existence on earth. But Laura on the other hand, had just one life. She did not have the option of pleasing everyone and then hurrying to apologise for every single inconvenience she caused them. In this one life, there wasn’t enough time for her to mope around and not live fully. Not a life that other people would always agree with, but one that suited her Creator - whatever that life looked like. And so as she went through the aisles at the supermarket searching for the perfect brand of cat food, she thought about what it was she was doing with this her one life. If she was doing what she was created to do, or if she would simply go down in history as the one person who was jealous of a Lykoi cat.