Funky little scraps of stories I will never write

The Kitten

The world is a bad place, people say, and they could be right. It's a dark, dangerous place full of dark, dangerous people. Life is all statistics, cruel numbers and cruel words. You can't change the world, so why bother trying at all?

But there's a kitten in the shelter where I volunteer. A little black kitten named Postal. He's too small and too cold and too weak, and no one thinks he'll make it through the day. But Kyrstin and I hear about the kitten in the sick room, and we go back to meet him. He shivers, and we shiver, and an unspoken agreement passes between the three of us.  We don't do our work that day. We pick up Postal, whose name we don't know and so we call Midnight, and we don't set him down until he's warm again. We swap stories and arms until everyone's held him. And he survives.

But it's my coworker's last day. She's moving to Virginia for culinary school, she tells us. She'll try to come back when it's done. We all know she won't come back. We finish our work early. Gina makes mimosas, while I (the sole underage volunteer present) sip orange juice from a fancy glass. We reminisce about her time here. We eat cake. We pet Trixie. We laugh, some of us for the first time in a while. I drink some more orange juice.

But I was only supposed to be there for a few months. Go in, get my volunteer hours, and head out for the summer. But by the time I'm supposed to be leaving, I can't think of doing anything else with my Sunday mornings. This place has become my community, the impact I want to leave behind. So I stay. I stay for the cats, for the wondrously terrible little beasts I've come to adore. And I stay for the people, for the eclectic band of adventurers who've all found themselves in that little cat shelter on Wehrle Street. And I know that I may not change the world. But when I bring cookies on Christmas Eve and Gina tells me how much she appreciates me, or I sit in the Shy Room with a particularly scared cat and talk to her until she trusts me, I think that's more important than some grand declaration. I would rather change one person's life than none at all because I was too busy trying to change the world. My impact will not be international. But it will be enough for the people and animals I tend to, and it's the little brushstrokes that create the big picture. The world may be a dark, dangerous place. But as I sit on the couch, three cats on my lap and a friend laughing in the back room, I know that it's not so dark nor so dangerous that we can't make our own light along the way.