If my Guinea Pig could speak, what would she say she has seen?

As ridiculous as it may sound, the objective of this essay is for me to explain what my guinea pig would say she’s seen, if she could talk. I asked Monisha to give me this task because, sadly, I feel as if my intelligence is slowly descending. Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to explain what exactly my guinea pig would say, but how I think she would react to the different things that meet her eyes.

In my opinion, she would be eating her words trying to explain all the colours and imagery she’s been experiencing in our urban residence. Unlike her ancestors, she doesn’t live in burrows or mountains, doesn’t experience the common predator, and doesn’t know what it’s like to see members of her colony ripped to shreds by those predators. She has, however, seen me naked.

Placed right outside my bedroom, only separated by a floor-to-ceiling glass window, she has inevitably witnessed me leaving the shower, water drops running down my bare back, and my hair lying tousled wet and tangled. She knows every scar, every stretch of skin, where there’s not enough meat, and where there’s too much. She knows the rawest parts of me; she has seen what even the sun has not.

Of course, she has seen other things, but how can things like the colour of the sky, sapphire blue speckled white, compensate with the image of a life-form, so different from one’s own, in its moment of truth? It can’t. And that’s what I think my guinea pig would talk about first, if only she could.