a rat

Along the polyurethane track encircling the park, I saw a rat slightly bigger than my hand running in the shadow of the curb holding back the dirt. It was running alongside a young woman who was exercising in the middle of the night. In the heat of a South Korean summer, it was fairly customary that the busy professionals of the urban hub of Seoul would exercise once the day cooled off. I could not take my eyes off of that grey rodent nor could I tell the runner in front of me of her uninvited workout partner. It was one of those moments, that was not particularly astonishing, exciting, or at all warranting of a blog post, but it was certainly memorable, sitting right on the edge of banality and extraordinary.

I cannot even describe the rat to you in full detail. In fact, it may have been a mouse for all I know. However this mysterious rodent was special to me in that it validated the existence of a critter my mother abhors (not suggesting that I felt like rats were a fairytale before). There is this dated fear my mother has: you cannot, or you must not, sit on the grass in any old park in Seoul, for the diseased rats could have, or most likely did, scurried over every inch of the sea of green blades. Silly. And a part of me could not accept that my free will, to step on, sit on, or I don’t know, chew on grass, was somehow halted by a rodent that I had never seen before in the wild urban landscape of the far east. Fuck the rat that tells me what to do.

But seeing the rat run alongside that woman, made me consider Veronica the name of an all too important rat in the sewers of Manhattan (ironically my mother’s baptismal name). Father Linus Fairing, the mad priest who preached to rats, had one special one that just kept on returning for that good old sermon. I never much cared for religion either. Feasibly, what keeps the rat running at night is not so different from the runner in the night – a sense of security beneath the moon and the dim street lamps; a feeling that the great heat of the day has sailed on by, leaving the grassy realm free for their tiny palms, dirtied by the dirt treaded on by countless others. It is but a part of a fiction we are all a part of.

Of course I see reason to hate the rat. I see reason to love the rat as well. It never told me what to do of course. That was simply my mother (who had every reason to be suspicious of grass). But the rat is running not because it needs to lose weight, but because it has things to do, rats to see, food to eat, and places to be, just like the runner in the night. When the unseen becomes seen, it is quite dazzling. It is amazing how a little critter just minding its business, can be the producer of so much abhorrence.