something about couches and cats

It was a cold June evening. The Sun was setting. A ceiling lamp cast a shadow on the ceiling that crept into some corner of the bedroom. As the clock struck seven, Elisabeth sat up on her bed. Reaching her hand into the dark insides of a bedside drawer, she got a bottle of sleeping pills.

She quietly opened the bottle and rolled the pills into her palm. It didn’t matter how many there were. She closed her eyes and focused on how cold the bedroom felt. Without a thought, she lifted her hand to her mouth and swallowed. It was now or never. She mustn’t think of anything. She mustn’t think at all.

When she was five, her mother got her a cat. Its colour was ash and its eyes were two big yellow discs. Elisabeth felt less lonely while her mother was away at work. There was a companion to cry into. Its deep, soft fur made for a nice pillow on which she could rest her head on. It would often crawl under the couch. Elisabeth remembered being on all fours, head on the floor, peeking into that dark world. Only two yellow discs staring back.

She had always wondered what it would feel like being a cat. Lying under the couch. Letting the darkness surround you and feeling the chill floor on your fur. Elisabeth, however, was too big to get under it. No matter how she turned and curled her body, no matter how she tried to compact herself into a little morsel, she was simply too big. At the age of seven, she started going to acrobatics. Maybe then she would learn how to fit under the shadowy gap between the couch and the floor.

The cat was long dead now. Buried under the cold earth, somewhere in a deep, dark place. Elisabeth was lying on her bed, eyes closed, head on a cool pillow. The empty bottle gently rolled out of her hands. The window was open and an icy wind was blowing in. She wanted to shiver but let that feeling pass. Letting the cold slowly settle in her body, somewhere deep in her - in the gap between her heart and lungs. A pang of regret crept along her spine. This, too, she ignored. It was her chance to crawl under the couch. To finally experience what her long-dead cat had.

She gave up acrobatics after three years. Her family moved by then and they threw away the old couch. The new one didn't have a gap big enough even for her cat to fit under. Despite her best attempts, she could not shove it under there. She acutely felt her body in the moments. Too heavy to carry around, too exhausting to feed and wash. Her arms were too long and her legs were too short. Her hair grew like straw and her eyes were always red from crying. Elisabeth cried for weeks when her mother threw away the old couch, and with it her dream. She wanted to beat her mother but she could only find the strength to beat herself. So she did.

She had read in a book once that if you hit yourself on the head hard enough you can lose your consciousness. Elisabeth quickly realised that hands and knuckles weren’t enough. So she started dropping books on her face. Textbooks, encyclopedias, books about chemistry, and chivalry, and romance. When her face hurt and when the blood ran from her nose, she would stop. A day-long headache would remind her of her failure. Elisabeth wanted to be unconscious even more on those days. She cried more, too. She would go to bed early, so that she had more hours to sleep and less hours to exist.

Elisabeth had been reading about sleeping pills and their effect for a long time. At the age of eighteen, she decided to study pharmacology. Her mother died five years later. Two years after that, she moved. Her new place didn't have a couch. Only a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom. A bedside drawer. She often spent her time in the bathtub, fully clothed and with no water. She liked the feeling of the cold metal. Another shiver grew somewhere deep inside her. This one managed to escape and her body shook. The shadow of the lamp crept up the ceiling, onto the wall, piercing the last rays of the setting Sun. Elisabeth breathed out slowly and dove under the couch.