Glowing Kitten
28 Feb 2024Meowers
Warning: potentially disturbing descriptions of mental health condition effects.
Kittenshine. A glowing kitten. This cute little thing appears in my journals from time to time, marking some important moments, starting from the very early times. Yet I never explained, never really told: what is actually in it for me? Why? What makes this, otherwise quite a basic, unpretentious interior decor element so valuable to me? So... While I have some time, and there's nothing really intensive happening around, I may as well tell you. Can't say it's a long story, but certainly not exactly the usual text you could find in these journals, mine or written by other people.
First of all, it's entirely a 'home' thing. I never take it on my ship, moving being the only exception, or to any other place that I might frequently stay at. Only the 'home'. Quite a statement to hear from a person who still doesn't know where her home is, or even what that concept of 'home' is all about. Or maybe I know, yet I don't have a place to truly call it my home, and, seemingly, never had. Only my old golden classic 'a place where I keep my stuff' kind of joke. The closest thing to home I had was that town in the old '91, but, a), it wasn't exactly mine, it was Mion's apartment and I, kind of, lived there together with her, and b), it lasted for maybe a month. I bet the whole town is a rubble field now. But oh hells did I drop a friggin lot of dead Thargoids around it because you can't just take stuff away from me, I'm getting upset. So I put it... Like in those silly videogames, to mark a place that I want to be my primary, the most important place to stay, to restore my energy. A place where I could drop my guard. My own guard, because, there, I have Kittenshine. My little protector.
See, I sleep with dimmed lights on. Always. Some quiet melodic music is preferable, but dimmed lights are a must. It's more of a habit now, but I simply can't get to sleep in total darkness, it's uncomfortable for me. And I see where all this may be going, some individuals may say that - phah! - she's an adult woman, doing some serious stuff, and she's afraid of darkness. And that's absolutely incorrect. I'm okay with the total darkness in general, and I don't see and don't imagine any monsters lurking in the shadows and other kinds of rubbish. I just can't get to sleep in it. Can't slow my mind enough to drift away, except for being absolutely drained, but, if I wake up in the middle of the night, or whatever time it is, and there's still darkness around, getting back to sleeping is going to be on the same level of uncomfortable, until I turn any source of warm dimmed light on. So, the Kittenshine.
When I randomly purchased Kittenshine years ago, it was simply a cute and cosy piece of interior decor it was meant to be, actually. And I like those things. And I like cats. It didn't have any official factory-given name of course, I named it Kittenshine over a bit of time. Because it's a kitten, and it does shine. Obviously. Some people say that I can make even a cargo container a cosy place to stay and live in, maybe that's one of my less known abilities, but an ability for sure. A trained one. Because I really needed it at the time, needed to make things around me at least a tiny little bit better than they were originally. Cheapest rental rooms, temporary worker living blocks, mobile hab units, that kind of stuff. No cargo containers, thankfully, but quite close to it. Dimmed warm lighting, a cup of tea, a bed to drop myself onto, and maybe a tiny portable computer or communicator to play music and serve as a window into the world, that was all I needed and maybe that's all I need even these days.
So... why the lights?
First, the nightmares. Your classic kind of bad sleep, with people around me, or people from my past, turning evil, hurting me, humiliating me. My own parents, oftenly. Sometimes, I have my revenge by killing them, in every possible and imaginable way. Not so many words to be said about it, it's so basic, so primitive that I got used to them quickly. Ah, another one, what kind of shit are you going to feed me tonight, you stupid brain. I don't even wake up sweating, at least for the last... Maybe ten years. Maybe fifteen already. Shit, I'm old, phah. But, yeah, be constantly subjected to some shit coming from every side and you will get this. Though, I guess, in the environment I lived those years, an absolutely bigoted cesspit full of morons with laws being more like a price list, being somehow non-conforming is your best option for getting that kind of experience. Way before going super mad with my latest adventures, being in my late teens, had to put down two especially angry arseholes, both self-defence. Felt absolutely nothing, like, it should've been done, me or them. And, I'm still here to tell my stories.
Sleep paralysis sucks. Really sucks. It sucks by itself, but it sucks even more if you work like a station tech, any kind of noname nobody in a high-vis jacket wrenching stuff here and there, rolling wires, getting into the maintenance shafts and having in any other way quite an eventful and colourful kind of life. If that colour is brown and you don't want to smell it. Many friggin pilots treat you like a lower form of life, not to mention those bloated business and corpo arseholes, and your bosses do the same, so, your shifts may last up to sixteen hours, six days a week, because if, or when, you die, it won't be a huge loss, there are thousands of losers like you pretending on your place. And, phah, you may have expected that, but the damn sleep paralysis sucks an absolutely enormous amount of rusty alarm clocks when it keeps bugging you for seven years straight, every second night, like on a schedule, and you also have to live like that. You get it one night, you can't refresh, you go to work and work your arse off, then you literally collapse because every cell of your body wants to sleep. Then, it repeats. Awesome. Amazing. I like it so much.
Yeah, it's less of an issue now, even if it started in my childhood and its peak magically coincided with, to say, the most unpleasant years of my existence. So sleeping with soft lights on is more like a habit. But, no matter what, I don't want to test the alternative option again, and it certainly had its investment in the giant load of shit I have to deal with these days. Nothing remains intact after like seven years in a bloody meat grinder.
Different people describe it in different ways, and the medical studies show it can be different. So, for me, it was like I see everything, a bit simplified and blurred maybe, with less real world details, but I'm absolutely aware that I'm in my bed, in the room where I got to sleep. The furniture may be in different places, the dimensions of the room itself may change a little, yet, for me, in my sleep, it's definitely the same room. And I can't move a single muscle, no matter how hard I try. I scream in my sleep in order to make a sound and pull myself out that way, but, in reality, quiet moans are the maximum, and they can't do any good. Then I managed to learn how to move and even how to stand up and make some slow sluggish steps, it didn't and it doesn't work every time, but at least it's better than nothing. I can't really describe it, but it doesn't work with sheer muscle power. Or, a neural signal to tell my muscles to give that bed all they got. But, no, that wasn't anywhere near sleepwalking, since every time I fell on the floor, quite painfully, the whole thing reset itself to the beginning. I was still sleeping. And that feeling of irrational fear, primal, visceral, appearing in sleep but definitely real, without anything around that I could call a source of such a fear, is just the worst. Fear and hopelessness, as there's no escape from the room now. Really, the worst, if it wasn't for fear, I'd just call the whole experience disgusting. And the heart, it not just thumps, it damn races, so hard I swear that when I finally wake up, I could see my chest shaking as if it's punching it from the inside trying to make a hole and run away searching for a place in a human with a less messed up head. So hard that I feel it can physically nudge my entire body a little. There was, actually, a proven method that's the total opposite, like, you should just stay calm and let it pass, but it doesn't work in my case, didn't work a single time. Eventually, the heart starts to beat so fast and hard I can feel it in my sleep, and the pure instinctive fight-or-flight wins over the conscious me. I don't want to try it again. A bit later, I gained another skill, to move lightweight objects like curtains, and open doors, since every curtain, every door in that nightmare limbo world is closed, it's separated, removed from the rest of the Universe. Like a stupid videogame level floating in the void since nobody thought you'd find a way to look outside. And, when I look, I see darkness. Not the lights off kind of darkness, but an absolute one. Emptiness. Void. Nothing. Darkness where nothing can exist. Darkness that, itself, can't exist. The fear strikes me even harder when I try to move something to get a look outside. I know what I'm going to see there. I'm perfectly aware. My hands are trembling and becoming hard to move, they don't want to do it, I don't want to do it. Or, a part of me, at least. Even the reality, the fabric of this nightmare, it skews, it stretches, trying to close the gap. Yet, in the end, I overpower the rules of that wicked little world, I look at the darkness, I gaze at it. Defiantly, maybe. A fraction of a second, maybe, but it's enough for this world to give up and release me. And then, I wake up. With even more of that primal fear. A sick parting gift. And with hardly tolerable heart rate that, thankfully, normalises in a couple of minutes. But, obviously, that isn't a good refreshing night's sleep.
And the last thing I want to see when I force myself to wake up this way is nothing. Darkness.
Now, you understand Kittenshine. Maybe, thanks to Kittenshine, I'm still alive. Or sane at least, to the level of sanity I can possibly reach. This little glowing kitten is so powerful it can destroy the darkness that's so deep it can't even exist in our world.
* * *
Yeah, sorry... Kind of. I wanted to write about that cute little kitten thing and why it is so important for a long time already, and maybe the latest mini-story acted as a catalyst since it included Kittenshine in one of the pictures.
So what started as a story about a cute glowing kitten, eventually descended into darkness. Classic. Yet, there's a glowing kitten, destroying the darkness in the end, because such is the nature of light: to destroy darkness. The light truly exists and truly means something only where there's a battle for it, there's a darkness for it to destroy.
Actually, I have four of them. Kind of, randomly stumbled upon a second one and couldn't stop myself because ow they're so cute. Two of the original shape and two of a bit bigger size, but I had put numbers on their bottoms so I know which one is the first, the original Kittenshine.
And, thank you for reading. Really, thank you.