Paprika

Edited from “8/18/23 – On Paprika”

My exile continues, by no efforts of my own to leave it. I’ve started reading again, somewhat, but Kafka is not the sort of voice that might assuage this feeling. I feel that familiar kinship with another voice describing over and over again how it feels to be an outcast. But Kafka, I think, experienced a much different relationship with humanity. He saw himself as acutely hated, especially by his father, and felt that he was disgusting. He rarely portrays other people as being in the wrong to reject his characters, but their actions come from a place of disgust.

I’m reminded of the first real pet I ever owned – a Roborovski dwarf hamster that I named Paprika for her rusty fur. I read a short article online about training your hamster to allow handling, and began right away. I was young, but certainly followed all the instructions, and still Paprika never improved. She ran terrified at the sight of my hands, and never left from hiding so long as I was present. In the end, I managed to scoop her up once and was bitten.

All my illusions of having a friend in Paprika vanished, and I sat by the cage and cried with all my heart. I was angry with her, briefly, for throwing away my obvious gestures of kindness. And then as the tears ebbed, I began to process through Paprika’s perspective. As a Roborovski, she was one of the smallest breeds with the smallest brains akin to a mouse. My brother and sister had both gotten Syrian hamsters which were larger, smarter, and easier to train. Even then, their hamsters never learned to like being held in their short lifetime. In all of that, I could find no reason why a hamster would want to be held anyway, only coerced into it in the expectation of food.

I contemplated Paprika’s existence, a thing trapped in a fog where all that can exist are threats and food. I feel fear when there is a threat, but I feel happy when there is food. I can live a good life, worth living, if I am always with food and never with threats. I would never be able to understand that there exists a thing who gives me food, or refrains from threatening me. If I could understand thankfulness, I would surely be thankful. Maybe I would even express that I was sorry, that I don’t understand what friendship is, and that I didn’t realize that I was given this life out of an expectation that I would be a friend. I simply lack the capacity. But I am happy.

For the rest of her life, I fed Paprika and cared for her cage diligently. I read manuals on care to ensure that any additions I made to her tunnels were non-invasive and infrequent enough to prevent stress. I learned to love the sound of her wheel each night, a rhythmic clanking that signaled the end of another day. It became our nightly exchange. “I am alive, I have food, thank you. I’m sorry we were never friends.”