Posters of the Missing

My cat is still missing. It will be a week on Tuesday. I really miss him. I keep thinking about him and hoping he didn’t meet an ugly end at the hands of some cruel twisted individual(s).

There is entirely too much evil in the world. I was reading about the highway of tears and how now they think they have a suspect in the murders, although so far they are only looking for one woman’s body, and that one woman is white. For those who don’t know what the highway of tears is, it’s a stretch of highway running from Prince George to Prince Rupert where for the last 40 years primarily aboriginal women have been going missing while hitchhiking.

The suspect is in prison for murdering his brother. The police are digging up the property and looking in a well that smells like diesel and might have been used to burn something. They even have special dogs that can locate remains, and a ground penetrating radar device.

I could never work in forensics or criminology. I think it would be a very bleak feeling dealing with that kind of evil day in and day out. Bleakness is a terrible feeling. That kind of loss of belief in human goodness.

There ARE good people in the world still. I know this. My cat could have adopted himself into another family of nice people. But I still think he would come home because they wouldn’t know him well enough to know he likes Friskies.

A missing cat and a missing woman are not the same things. I know this. There won’t be an investigation into where my cat went, and if someone did do something to him, he or she (but probably he) will most likely get away with it. But then it makes me think about all the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and how sometimes it seems as if our lives are equal to those of cats. Just more faces peering out of faded posters, dotting the landscape, reminding us that we are not safe or protected.

I wish my cat had been an indoors cat. I feel guilty for letting him go outside this summer at mum’s. And now I’m in limbo, wondering if I will ever see his sweet face again.