I was a cat in my past life

The way I collapse into rest and long leisurely afternoons all but denotes some ancient feline predilection. Awakened my long stretches and canoodling in scattered sun rays.

If we’re to ask the Ori, it’s not a matter of if but how quickly they would recount my tails at the feet of great queens. Stalking night prey from mighty perches. Bathing in my own mysterious liquid gold.

The ancestors said I needed to know worship. Needed to organize myself around a singular source. Had to grasp what it is to know rest and abundance at the same time. What it means to speak and not be heard. Move and not be seen. Getting to experience an innate self trust above all else.

Those aren’t things afforded to black girls in this plane. We are organized around our black thingness—afforded a body that is simultaneously disasteredly threat and sensual object of desire. We know rest often when it’s too soon or too late. Abundance if ever usually holds endless sacrifice or a monkeys paw trick. We demand and scream and still our tears hold silence so as not to wake the ghosts of those who died lending us their voices. We are seen but not felt, embodied in an orbit of our own making out of obligation not freedom. We drown in doubt of not knowing whether we are or are not safe. Taking hours to discern where we fit because no one else would tell us.

Maybe the next life I can return as carefree as cat. I’ll be allowed to dream without the intrusive programming of a millennia scorned and defiled. The privilege only clear in private rooms of camouflage and caress. I wish I could afford that luxury while this life keeps ticking.