Becomings: The Cat at the Bottom of the Valley

In this dead city where I live, there are plenty of places where one can scream, or that's how I percieve them. I have learned the ritual of screaming from my mother, ten years ago we were in an empty park at 7AM, she stepped down from the car, stood near a guard rail which overlooks a dead valley, and she let out a loud monotonous scream, it didn't echo, nothing replied but I remember feeling really embarressed. The air swallowed the scream and covered me with heavy density, I didn't have the power back then to scream back at the air and shatter that heavy cloud of sound into small pieces. Scream-becoming-heavy-air.

Last night we went to the same spot, parked the car and walked together to stand before the same dark valley. My mother screamed, her scream was low pitched, agonzied and muffled. Nothing replied, no echo. So I took her scream and amplified it tenfolds: It was really loud, lasted about a minute, till it scratched my larynx. There was no echo, but my scream had to turn into something else, a scream never dies out, it morphes into different shapes that can be intangible. I heard a cat yowling, I yowled back. It was somemwehre down the dark valley, it heard my scream and turned it into a series of frantic sounds. The cat and I, kept meowing at eachother for more than five minutes, throwing my scream back and forth as if it's a repulsive thing no one wants to catch. Scream-becoming-cat-sounds.

My mother went to the car and brought some water and food for the cat, we went down together but the cat escaped in fear when it saw us, took our screams and ran away.

          

                                                *photo by me