We Could Be Rats

by Emily R. Austin

I’m not sure I’d recommend taking the advice of an uneducated, twenty-year-old dead woman, but if you insist, I might say you should try being like a rat at a fair. To be clear, I don’t mean that you should gorge yourself on carnival garbage. I just think you should try to collect days like that. Do whatever will turn you into a rat ball, so to speak.

Before caterpillars become butterflies, they turn into guck in their cocoons. They don’t just grow wings from their caterpillar worm-bodies; their old body breaks down into a liquid, and their new body forms from the remains. I felt like I was guck, and my body was a cocoon. I felt like I was absorbing myself, becoming a whole new bug, and I didn’t want to be. I preferred to be a worm. I liked my worm-thoughts. My worm-body. I didn’t want to change. I wasn’t

I’m not sure why we tell kids everyone’s so unique. We aren’t really. I get wanting to make kids feel special, but most people are more of the same. It might be easier to grow up if kids weren’t sold this tall tale that we’re all exceptional. It might make it less jarring to become an adult if we knew the truth the whole time. We’re mostly ordinary.

I wasn’t a difficult person around other people. In fact, I don’t think anyone outside of our family would describe me as exhausting or dramatic. I think you might have a warped perception of me. People saw me differently than you saw me. I saw myself differently than you saw me.

I think you thought of me as someone who didn’t have it together. I think I was our family’s scapegoat, or something. I was a distraction from the real underlying issues in our dynamic. I think I bore the brunt of the negative attention.

The problem is, I think one of the benefits of growing up with a sibling is having a witness. It’s nice to have someone to cross-reference your childhood with.

She and I used to talk about how a lot of life felt like that, like we were never the target audience for any of it, like we were always on the outside of something.

It’s occurred to me that everyone needs someone who understands them and believes in them. Having even one person who really gets you, and likes you, feels sort of vital for survival.

It hadn’t occurred to me that not panicking was an option.

I just wanted to be happy, but sometimes your own happiness comes at the expense of other people’s, doesn’t it? It’s hard to balance being both happy and considerate. I often tried to be both by lying, but that usually made it worse.

If I walked around town and everyone called me a pig, I’d think, This is amazing. It would feel like we were all playing some cute make-believe game.

I wish adults did things like pretend to be pigs more often.

On my end, it felt less like lying than it did like playing.

I prefer the world I built in the basement to reality.

I was getting older and losing my capacity to imagine. My dress rehearsal was ending, and I was just going to have to be who I was.

If I could have picked what I was born to be, I would be a fat little rat at a fair. I would ride the Ferris wheel all night. All the carnival lights would reflect in my happy, beady eyes. I would feast on candy apple cores, discarded peanuts, and melon rinds. I would spook ladies and carnival workers for kicks. When the lights went out, and the gates were shut, I would scurry around on the ground, rummage through trash cans, and squeak happily with my rat pals. I would live to be about two years old, which is as long as most rats live. I would get my money’s worth out of my little rat lifespan, and I would leave the earth happy to have been there.

I’m not sure there is a way to be alive without upsetting people. We’re all in this web together, aren’t we? Everything we do tangles everybody else together.

Inaction is an action.

I think the moon is a woman. People always say, “the man in the moon,” but there’s no way the moon is a dude. She’s got a soulful face. She’s gorgeous. In French, the moon is a feminine word. The sun is a man, but the moon—la lune—she’s a lady.

We don’t actually get much choice in life, do we? I used to think I could do anything, but that’s not really how things work. It’s a facade. The truth is we get very little wiggle room. We’re born where we are, with the bodies we have, the smarts we’ve got, and our destinies all mapped out. It’s preordained, or at least I think it is. I have to do what I’m asked to do. There is no escape.

If everyone could just be rat-like, find a hot dog, and work together to turn rain into sugar.

Greta taught me the villains tended to be queer coded, and I did identify in some ways with Cruella and Ursula, but I never saw myself as a bad guy. I was Simba; I wasn’t Scar. I thought everyone felt that way.

I get this desperate feeling sometimes. Like I’m a kid banging inside the cage of my adult body, dying to escape to the moon. I get this terrible sense that I’m trapped all alone. I can’t stand feeling like that. When I do, I’m frantic to escape; I can’t think straight.

I decided that deep down we’re all who we were when we were kids.

I think being a teenager is about hiding all your quirks and contorting yourself to fit in and impress people, and being an adult is about re-finding who you were when you were eight years old.

I don’t want to be a swamp-monster. I don’t want to be someone who hurts people. I don’t think I was meant to be that. I think I was meant to be a rat.