I remember the day our ginger cat, Pimicious, came into our lives. We bought him and his brother Brad to keep our older kitten, Nikita, company. Brad was quiet and easygoing, but Pimicious was playful, sassy, and had a meow that was way too big for his frame. We named him Dante, but he never answered to that. As a joke, I started calling him “Pim Pim” because he darted about like spurts of water from a water gun—and he loved it. Whenever I called him PimiPim or Pimicious, he would reward me with a scraggly meow.
Pimicious and his brother were malnourished and bruised when we bought them. Three weeks later, we lost Brad to illness. We were so scared PimPim would succumb too, but the little tyke was a fighter.
And a handful.
He ate a lot and pooped twice as much. As if it couldn’t get worse, he liked his litter changed every two days—anything more than that, and he would do his business elsewhere. It was literally hell. To cap it off, he was always picking fights with the older kitten. Everyone was fed up with him. This was too much stress just for a pet.
I’ll admit I got upset at him once or twice, but he was my Pim. All he needed was a little patience. I fed him, bathed him when he ran into my younger brother’s paint materials, and cared for him. Most days, you would find Pimicious sleeping on my lap while I wrote, sleeping next to me while I slept, or trying to filch bread from me while I ate. A year and seven months later, Pimicious is the most well-behaved and easygoing cat you’ll ever meet.
Life has robbed me of many things. However, I refuse to let it take the innocence of believing in the good in everyone. Growing up, I saw people boxed into tidy little compartments based on factors like gender, religion, tribe, and states of origin. I was taught to see people in black and white, just like piano keys, repeating the same sharps and flats as those who came before them. I will admit that seeing the good in everyone has hurt me many times. However, between the hurt, this disposition has helped me find the greatest good in the most unlikely places.
First impressions matter, but they can never give you a holistic view of a person. Human beings are so multi-layered and multidimensional that it is almost impossible to know everything there is to know about a person from a singular meeting. So why, then do we judge people based on those first impressions? We build up lofty expectations of people before meeting them and make projections on how they should act, instead of accepting them as they are. And when they don’t meet those expectations, we run back into the castle of our assumptions and decree that humans are mean.
People say I think like a child, that every adult knows you cannot be that trusting of people. If adulthood is seeing and believing the worst of people and things, then I’d rather stay a child. I refuse to believe that life is as diseased and evil as people make it out to be. Yes, bad things happen, but there are only intermissions in the beauty and wonder that is living, contrasts that help us appreciate the good even more. I refuse to believe that there is an unspoken never in happily ever after, that people will always give you vitriol and not love. I decide to believe in the immutable goodness of man, to believe that while we do horrible things, we are equally capable of the greatest good.
PimPim came into our lives battered and bruised, distrustful and combative.
And why wouldn’t he be?
He had spent the earliest part of his young life fighting, struggling for food and water with eighteen other kittens in a filthy cage at Ogbete market. And as war is mental, he continued to fight even when he had a family that loved him. That is the way it is with us. We have been so broken that we find it hard to believe in the existence of good. When we glimpse good on the horizon, we look at it squint-eyed, certain it is evil playing one of its tricks. A mirage that will disappear when we come too close. We keep fighting and fighting and fighting. Even when we find someone whose soul feels like home, we bludgeon their good intentions with the mace of trauma, and the cycle continues.
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