The Subway Kitten

One morning last spring, I was making my normal journey to school via Septa, Philly’s public transit system. My transfer from the trolley to the subway must have been inaccurately timed that day, because I missed the subway train by just a hair. It was one of those awful moments that every public transit rider knows- being at the top of the stairs and seeing the train at the bottom; knowing that you’re just far enough away to make it downstairs half a second after they close. You could try to make it, shoving children in the oncoming crowd out of your way as you run. But then you think about all the effort running down the stairs would take, and about how much energy you’d have to use shoving all those kids. So you resign yourself to the fact that you were meant to take the late train this morning, and you take your sweet time getting down those steps.

It must have been that act of succumbing to my fate that set the tone of my day. This may sound like a good and pleasant thing to some of you, but for me, it’s usually neither. When I’m in a fateful mood, things get intense. Something will happen, and I’ll get all excited and inspired and I’ll decide that it was Fate that put me there to witness that event, and as a result I feel obligated to take action in response to whatever it was that I witnessed. For some reason, in my mind, it becomes my civic duty, as dictated by some higher power, to intervene. It’s kind of like believing you’re a superhero. Many of my stupidest mistakes and decisions are made this way.

Case in point: when I got downstairs that day after missing the subway and saw a tiny black kitten stranded down on the tracks, it took me about a second and a half to decide that Fate was at work, and that I needed to act accordingly.

I think it goes without saying that I am, um, kind of a “cat person.” Whenever I see one- anywhere, in any situation- my brain goes “Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!” and I need to go pet it and poke it in the face and have other such physical interactions with it. If I don’t, my brain keeps yelling long after the cat has left my presence, until something else adequately distracts me. This happens with my own cats, with other people’s cats, with cats I see in windows as I walk by houses, and with lions and tigers at the zoo. So there is no reason to believe that this obsessive need was not the driving force behind my almost-immediate decision to go rescue the kitten I saw on the tracks. It’s just that my brain has had enough experience with this sort of thing to be able to hide my highly flawed reasoning behind the whole Fate thing, and so my thought process went like this:

Kitty! Kitty! Look at the- wait, holy shit. I was put here at this place and this time this morning to rescue this cat. Without my direct intervention, this KITTY! will definitely die.

I got all serious and determined. There weren’t many other people standing on the platform yet, and I knew that because a train had just left, I had at least five minutes to jump down to the tracks, grab the cat, and haul myself back up. School became unimportant. I began to re-plan the rest of my day: this kitten was tiny, and I could easily carry it back home with me on the trolley, get it into a carrier, and take it to the vet. My brain kept zooming out further and further, and I kept thinking about things on a bigger and bigger scale. I went from the amount of time I needed to execute the rescue, to the logistics of getting the kitten back home, to where I could keep the kitten until I moved into a new apartment in a few months, to the fact that we’d been planning on getting a new kitten when we moved anyway, and a black one at that, so how perfect was it that this just happened to be a little black kitten? And then I was back to thinking about it in terms of fate, and away went any hope of me thinking about this in a rational, logical, truthful way.

Seriously, what is wrong with my brain that the thought “if you jump down into the subway tracks, you might get run over or get electrocuted or both” floated in and back out so quickly that it really wasn’t even a factor? Why didn’t I consider the possibility that this kitten might run from me once I got down there, and that it might not be the simple, 30-second rescue I had planned? Why didn’t I think to go upstairs and get an authority figure to radio the approaching train and tell it to stop? Why didn’t I take into account all of the completely legitimate points that everyone else effortlessly pointed out to me later in the day: a train had just left the tracks, and it obviously hadn’t run over the kitten. The kitten probably lived in the subway. There was probably a colony of feral cats that made its home in the depths of the subway tunnels, and this one had just wandered out a little too far. Oh, and the most important one: it’s just a fucking cat. It’s not worth getting yourself killed by a train.

I think I didn’t consider all these things because my entire thought process, and in fact the entire situation I’ve described up until now, took place within about six seconds. And in those six seconds, I was having a really hard time getting any other thoughts around “Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!” The few thoughts that did manage to squeeze out were the ridiculous, illogical ones. And that is a true testament to my character. My ridiculous, irrational, feline-obsessed character.

Anyway, things indeed did not go as I had so carefully, meticulously planned them. That was mostly because when other people see you toss your bag aside, sit down on the ground, and swing your legs over the platform into the tracks, they freak out a little. I couldn’t understand why no one else was as concerned as I was. This was the life of an innocent baby animal we were talking about. Someone had obviously tossed it onto the tracks, and it was too small to jump back up, leaving it helpless and doomed unless I intervened. I spent a minute or two fruitlessly trying to convince everyone else that what I was about to do was both necessary and safe. They spent the same amount of time trying to explain to me that it was neither. One guy said, “Are you sure it wasn’t a rat?” which pushed me over the edge from Urgent and Anxious to About to Shit A Brick. I (quite literally) teetered on the edge of my decision for a second, and then I realized I couldn’t see the kitten anymore.

Whereas this should have made me happier by convincing me that the kitten was able to escape somewhere, it further distressed me by making me think, “Where’d the kitty go?? Kitty come back! Kitty!” So I swung myself around, now completely horizontal on the dirty, disgusting subway floor, and hung my head into the track area. I spotted the kitten after a second, crouched in a small square cutout that receded about 6-8 inches into the wall. Someone else saw him too (someone who was standing up like a normal person, rendering my dangerous position dangling out into the tracks completely unnecessary), and used the opportunity to point out to me that the kitten would be fine, because he was able to hide there.

The stranger’s ability to realize and point out the logical thought that I couldn’t seem to produce was what finally made me realize that I was lying on the ground in the subway station and everyone was staring at me. It was this- the knowledge that the kitten was safe from harm, and not the sound of the next train approaching and the fact that I would be killed if I stayed there much longer- that made me stand up, dust myself off, and part ways with the kitty.

I spent the rest of the way wondering if I had followed my fate or if I had defied it by not going after the kitten (even though, obviously, if fate is real then it’s impossible to defy… but I didn’t seem to think of that one either). It’s clear now that I was meant for bigger and better black kittens, because a few months later I adopted Bug, my wonderful little princess who steals my food, knocks everything off my night table in the middle of the night, eats my plants, and takes some of the smelliest shits I have ever experienced. No, if I had gone down into the subway that day, I may never have experienced such a wonderful pet. And I wouldn’t have learned an important life lesson: fate-inspired ideas on weekday mornings are never good ones.