petco: the endpoint of a hot girl's decline

karma karma karma karma karma chameleon

from Japingka Aboriginal Art

When I was six months pregnant, I went away for a night with friends from college. I hadn’t seen them in years. None of them knew I was pregnant. SURPRISE! We’d planned to do a lot of walking and swimming, but it rained so we sat on fluffy couches scrolling through Instagram and discussing the fates of the folks we used to know, my mind drawing its predictable blank.

“Wait, I don’t remember that name,” I’d say. “Show me a picture.” My friends would show me a picture. And then inform me that the girl I’d forgotten was my roommate freshman year.

Almost all my college memories are of macabre night-scapes—me, swerve-biking to campus (at night, why?) under the orange, west Philadelphia street lamps that did little to illuminate the trolly car grooves so that I regularly caught my tire and ate chunks of Spruce Street. In other memories, I’m falling up the same hill, stomping home in a slithery dress and stilettos, shouting into the cold air. I remember poufs of smoke and my voice ringing just outside my head. I remember wearing scarves as shirts. I remember feeling remorse every time I ventured out, which I soothed by hiding for months. Those were dark, concussed times. If you knew me between 2002 and 2006, I apologize.

As we closed out the first evening of this girl’s trip, just as my friends were beginning to convince me it was sometimes sunny in Philadelphia, I got this text from Christopher:

OMG is a subtle response. Could be surprise. 😳 Could be excitement. 💥 Could be horror at realizing you have peaked and are now a schlepping mother in slow decline. 🫣 I know what it means to own a lizard.

Lily and I grew up in a pretty rural place. Far from the pet store. But somehow our parents took us to that shop all the time and kept forgetting the word no. Eventually we had dogs and cats and rabbits and birds and fish and finally, a geko.

One of my parents—my mom, predictably, if insanely, considering she was busy 3/4 of the month in LA working 90 hours a week to make a sitcom—would drive over the hills and far away to buy crickets for the lizard. Because lizards only eat living crickets.

I spent most of the spring hoping Mo would escape. Not die, visibly, but leave the safety of his orange heat lamp—a Hellscape, always burning—and perish under a cool, shady maple leaf, where the kids wouldn’t see. I fantasized about leaving the mesh top open just a little while feeding him the (medium sized only) crickets. I also fantasized about feeding him the large crickets, which we’d been informed would swarm and devour him. But then I pictured the boys encountering shredded scales and I went begrudgingly back to Petco, enacting the inevitable fate of… becoming a cricket chauffeur like my mother. Except without the rise-to-fame perk.

Shortly before Penn—perhaps a reason for my bruised memory—I gobbled a handful of dried fungi during a lightening storm at a music festival. My friend and I stood in the middle of the field, laughing and licking our lips and speaking each others thoughts while our arm hairs stood straight up and down. The trip wore off just as people emerged from their tents and I was gobsmacked to notice that everybody looked like an animal. A bear! A kitten! A mouse! I’ve had that experience during a few other mildly psychotic occasions—that is, immediately postpartum.

When Max was two days old I went out to buy myself a new journal. I was proud of shuffling across 95th street even though I should’ve been in bed. And I was immediately reminded of my field trip. People looked like animals again. A bear! A kitten! A mouse! There must be something about exploding your empathic pathways that engenders reverse anthropomorphic seeing.

And then I had Bruce and the phenomenon returned, except in reverse. God help me, this last birth busted my circuitry. Now the animals look like babies! The carnival goldfish I won in a milk-bottle toss last MAY is… my best friend. It hurls its little kissy mouth against the glass of the flower vase it lives in to say good morning. I sprinkle flakes (“Bug Bites: Insect Larvae Recipe Fish Food”) over the water and kick my foot so my apron flutters.

And Mo: he swivels his scaly head and stares at me with his tiny, bulging eyes and I feel my heart go BOOM. When the kids are at school I find myself pressed against his tank, marveling at the graceful bend of his toes; the pinkness of his ear. Or is it a side-body nostril? I identify with this creature—in my youth, I also had an angular jawline and a slinking bod. At one point I got so slim, I turned cold-blooded. I, too, dwelt in a dim, orange Hellscape.

Just last week, Christopher dropped this tidbit: “Oh, leopard gekos live twenty-five years.” Doubly cruel because it’s long enough for our children to be grown and flown, but just shy of the time it’ll take for their father to retire and become available for twice-weekly trips to the pet shop.

And uh-oh, the hormones are regulating, my extreme empathy narrowing back to normal. I shake the bag of crickets into Mo’s glass box and watch him dart and snatch the insects in his delicate mouth. Sometimes, instead of swallowing them, he lets them dangle and twitch. He stares absently at the glass. I think of old boyfriends and feel sorry. I, too was thoughtless enough to be an accidental savage. My trips to Petco are karma at its most amused.

I’m decades past identifying with the distracted hot-girl I once was. I’m decades from the irresponsibility of accepting psilocybin from a friendly dude in sandals. (A bear!)

Which leaves Mo with one hope: that I’m a fertile octogenarian.

🔥🦎🔥🦎🔥🦎🔥

Some thoughts for my Artist’s Way friends (never too late to join as a paid subscriber and get a weekly creative jounce!!!).

How are these thoughts from Week 3 sitting:

1. “The universe falls in with worthy plans and most especially with festive and expansive ones.”

2. “The universe is prodigal in its support. We are miserly in what we accept… we say we are scared by failure, but what frightens us more is the possibility of success.”

As per 1) I can’t deny two things: I am still a victim of the belief that hard, self-punishing work is what gets results. The first time I read this quote I was frankly…. offended. It threatened my whole sensibility. But I’ve come to appreciate that there’s nothing I’d rather believe in than a benevolent universe.

And 2) I get close to finishing, winning, closing, peaking—and balk. I sandbag. I act like I don’t care, I didn’t want it anyway. I think it might be why I spent my hot girl era solo riding on a bicycle at night and going out hard every so often only to disappear for months in quivering remorse. Power is scary to hold. It’s hard to go electric if you don’t have a grounding cord.

I’m curious—

• What power have you had or come close to that you couldn’t bear?

• Where do you sandbag?

• How do you care for yourself when life moves towards peak experience?

⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️

xx Isabel