Once upon a time, two girls walked home from school together every day. Spoiler alert! Those girls were Abbz and me. I know, didn't see that one coming, right? It was our sophomore year and as a result we had neither our licenses nor vehicles to call our own. Fortunately for us, we both lived 10 minutes (walking distance) from school and as a result, we spent many happy hours walking home together over the course of that year. That was one of those special blessings of our friendship: the fact that we lived within walking distance of our school and, consequently, of each other. Before we were grown up enough to drive, the times we spent walking together created countless special little memories that continually deepened our friendship.
But back to our story. On this particular occasion, it was a cold February day. Very cold. In fact, temperatures had been freezing or below for that whole week. We were bundled to our noses, backpacks full of homework strapped to our backs, and doubtless chattering about our day and all the little dramas and hilarities that had taken place therein. We crossed the busy road and started down the long sidewalk that was so familiar to us.
One of the reasons that Abbz and I are so perfect for each other is that we both talk in exorbitant amounts. Individually we have the ability to talk almost endlessly. If you ask me, the reason is probably that we are very excited about our lives and the things that go on in them, and that excitement pours out of our mouths in a waterfall of words. But if you think we're bad on our own (and trust me, our fathers do), we are even worse together. After all, with two people, there's double the conversation to cover. We often have the same thoughts, so we feed off of each other and thus spur each other on in our verbal marathon. In fact, we've gotten so close over the years that many times, others have a hard time keeping up with our conversation because we know what the other one is saying before they say it, so we will leave a thought verbally unfinished and move on to a new one in a second. What can we say? It's a sister thing.
All this is to say that as we made our cold trek toward home, we were so caught up in conversation that it's a wonder that we noticed anything along the way. Thankfully though, while we are both excellent conversationalists, we are also both superb multi-taskers.
And so, after we had travelled about half way down the sidewalk, something caught our attention. It was something so out of the ordinary that, at first, we didn't believe our eyes. We stopped in our tracks, conversation halting mid-sentence. As we stared, we realized that what we were seeing was in fact, what we thought it was.
It was a cat. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, cats aren't extraordinary. I see cats all the time. Before you pass judgement on our discovery, though, let me give you a little more information about this cat. It was lying in the bushes beside the sidewalk, legs outstretched, eyes wide open, and frozen solid. That's right, frozen.
We couldn't figure out for the life of us why a cat would decide to lie down and let itself freeze to death. There were no other signs of injury - it was not smashed, cut open, or dismembered. It did not appear to be starved. It was simply frozen. It's awkwardly extended legs and glassy, glaring eyes actually made it look like the freezing had taken place in a second.
As we ogled at it, we grew more and more thrilled - not at the fact that the cat was dead (this was rather unfortunate), but at the singularity of our discovery. Who is just walking down the road and finds a full grown cat, frozen solid? No one, we told ourselves. But we did.
Remember what I said earlier about us being excitable girls? Well let this instance stand as exhibit A. We hovered over the body and chattered quickly about why the cat was there and how crazy it was that we had come across it. We debated on whether or not we should touch it, decided that was a germy idea, and eventually settled for poking it with the tips of our boots. I distinctly remember having Abbz hold my arm as I reached out gingerly with my boot, as if the cat might spring to life and swallow me from my toes up. When I prodded a little, the strange, hard, frozen feeling sent me into a bought of squeals highly fitting for a 15 year old girl.
After spending several more minutes examining our find and bouncing around on the sidewalk, we eventually tore ourselves away from poor little freezer-head and began our mad-dash home to inform our parents of what was surely the biggest event of the week. They were, of course, appropriately shocked, as were our friends and teachers at school the next day when we burst the information upon them.
Granted, we might have overreacted a little. Yet it was a marvel and I bet if that happened today, I'd be just as shocked as I was two years ago.
We went on to find several other things of note along that path including a Starbucks gift card with $10 on it. If you think we were excited about the cat, you should have seen us then.
Since that day, we've obviously had many other exciting adventures. But coming across that cat is, to this day, one of the strangest. Sometimes in life, it's really the small things that create the best memories. And I can honestly say that I will never ever forget that poor, dead, feline.
~Kenz
#youngheartsgocrazy #weownedthenight #cookiesmakeushyper #ThugLife
