Are you screaming yet?

from Hausu , 1977 (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi)

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Is there a better word to explain defeat than longing? I wonder what the grey cat in Obayashi’s Hausu was thinking everytime it decided to mar the innocence of the young girls fleeing to a giant summer home and the promise of a father enthralled in the neoliberal fantasy of a perfect stepmother. Koganada explains that the cat is a representation of the absurdity of human loss, the grey hairs are the grey cloud of the atomic bomb devastating an entire generation of humans and an entire lifetime of hope.

Today feels like that cat, for me today has been about not leaving bed, refusing to take care of my needs and an unyielding desire to find quick intimacy where im not supossed to be looking for it. Are we destined for a giant, insurmountable loss like the one personified in Hausu at the hands of a seemingly innocent cat? Are we meant then to silence this expected loss, flee from it’s inevitable downpour and try to find ourselves renewed in other shores?

It is almost funny to think of shores, and their ambiguous embrace, the privilege of running up to them and being able to take in the vastness of our misunderstanding, the incongruency of our longing to be “free”.