Strix

There’s no simple definition for Strix. Seldom is she described in any way that isn’t confusing or contradictory. At her core, that’s what she is. A walking contradiction of a cat.

She’s completely and utterly in love with the world. Even though she has limited interactions with life, from her difficult upbringing in a tyrannical leader’s posse, to the rough many months of travel in her early life, Strix still finds ways to find tenderness in her heart for her surroundings. Her soul is in everything, in the coalescing dew on morning leaves, in the vastness of space that stretches infinitely above her ears, to each burning, grieving star that hangs within it.

She believes in beauty, though she’s not interested in petty vanity. That isn’t to say she isn’t vain, but her obsession with beauty runs deeper than the appearance of herself and those around her. Her fascination with life is genuine, and this comes across in her words, actions, the morals she lives by. Strix has a fire that can’t be easily put out, a persistent hopefulness that things could; would be better. The world has not been kind to her in her youth, but she still loves with a vibrancy that could put a field of wildflowers to shame. Her reverent devotion is to no cat or God, but the air she breathes and the moss she swaddles herself in.

Going hand in hand with her fascinations, Strix is, unsurprisingly, quite the reflective cat. She is never not pondering, assessing, contemplating. It’s hard to love something as large as her life without picking apart the pieces that arrange it. She spills out at the corners, a lake overflowing with flood water when the storm roars overhead. Particular, and detail oriented in a vast sense.

There’s an unmistakable passion in Strix’s heart. She yearns to understand more. Exploring life every blade of grass at a time, Strix sees things like an interwoven tapestry. All thread becomes something bigger, and more beautiful.

While certainly consumed by her abstract thoughts more often than not, Strix is far from a shrinking violet of a cat. She burns with intensity, with conviction. Even if cats don’t want to hear what she has to say, she’ll be saying it anyway. Convoluted, of course, unfortunately there are very rare times that others understand her regardless of her intention. Her brain works in strange ways, and many could very quickly glean that she is a rather peculiar cat. Contrived to all others but herself.

tender genuine reflective passionate
vocal peculiar aloof avant garde brash melancholic
irrational discontent inconsistent

To say Strix is aloof is to ask if a dog barks. Focusing on every detail of the world around her, shockingly, makes for a cat who doesn’t always understand a bigger picture. She’s perceptive perhaps to a fault. Something pressing, staring her right in the eyes would still be a concept to pick apart for Strix, and she often gets lost in it. A sea of information where every wave is something new to experience. It can be tough to keep Strix’s attention, at times, and she has no problem keeping it that way. There’s a certain fickleness to her that becomes apparent to most.

She tends to express herself in what she surrounds herself with. She understands the heartbeat of the world perhaps more than the flesh and blood of others. There’s something avant-garde about the way she views things, perhaps unlike anyone else. She is abstraction, conceptual, yet breathing, living, bleeding. In some ways, disconnected from her own reality, yet in tune with it all the same. Living each moment at a time means that Strix doesn’t often plan for the future, regardless of her reflective nature. This can make her decisions brash, and uncoordinated. She’s jumping into things before the consequences are even revealed, and it often results in more than a few bruises and bumps. Both physical, and mental.

It’s often said an artist's soul is vast. And within vastness, there is a certain emptiness that Strix loathes. For all the passion, all the determination and hope in her, to understand the world completely is to understand that there is a deep pain in everything. Melancholy rings like a low echo at the back of her skull, perhaps more days than she’d let on. Dread often treads upon the tail of cognizance. Strix has seen the horrors that life has to offer, bore witness to inhumanities that could never quite melt away from her mind. Pain was the reason she was taken away, to somewhere else. Somewhere not home. Young, yes, but no less aware of the heaviness in her collective heart.

Reasoning, plain and simple, is not her strong suit. She is tactless, and fumbling in many situations. Her impressionistic views oftentimes leave her thinking irrationally, abandoning reason to further inflate her imagination. How she understands a situation may not always line up with how it really is, which can be frustrating to both herself and others. This also means that, in truth, Strix is not a people person. She often feels discontent with cats who can’t seem to understand her, and by extension, with the social parts of her life. Much like a lobster outgrowing its own shell, Strix herself is too big for her own skin. She is excess, a river bloated with rainwater, or a sweeping tide. She, simply, is too much.

Much like her father, Strix isn’t a particularly consistent feline. Opting often for the exact opposite, she is akin to reflections under the water. Constantly shifting, warping, moving, never quite being grasped, or understood. Her reasoning one day can switch the next, often bleeding into her relationships in a negative way. An inconsistent cat is an unreliable cat, and Strix has never thought much about what being reliable means to her. A fractured mosaic, while certainly beautiful, rarely tells the story that wants to be heard.