Vision reptile cage

Philadelphia PA

Description

i thought elise might be tired, so i turned off the lights. most people think reptiles don’t need that much rest, but i know elise. elise is a desperate leaf chameleon. you might think that’s a little on the nose. you’d be right. i did a lot of research before i got her. desperate leaf chameleons are delicate. they are no bigger than a french fry from nose to tail. they need a lot of support. i wanted elise to feel like she had a true home, so i bought her a vision reptile cage. can you believe how small she is? she’s so intricate and precious. her home to her is vast and wild. it looks like a true zoo habitat. it’s full of living branches and real dirt. i got a pretty nice paycheck over christmas but i didn’t have much of anyone to spend it on, so i bought elise a new tank. it was even bigger. i planned to transplant her existing habitat whole and fill in the edges with more life. i had tinkered with the heating system on the vision brand tank, so i sometimes closed any gaps i had opened with duct tape if it was especially cold. i thought elise might die sooner or later. well, i guess i knew she would. but the lifespan of the desperate leaf chameleon is unknown, although any animal in captivity may live longer than its wild counterpart. its existence was only discussed in the literature for the first time in 2012! different species of chameleon live between 2 and 8 years. i had begun thinking about whether to replace her with a razorback musk turtle or a Diamondback terrapin. you might think Diamondback terrapins are a little basic. i don’t care! basic is basic for a reason. i wanted a boy Diamondback for their classic markings, which i find breathtaking, a masterpiece. really i needed a companion for elise in case she died unexpectedly and i was too heartbroken to find a new friend on short notice. reptiles take a long time to procure, unlike mammals. a new dog or a cat is a car ride away but a razorback musk turtle takes time, like a soulmate. chameleons are zygodactylous! this means they have four toes, shaped like an X. some species of owl are zygodactylous, in addition to cuckoos and parrots. the desperate leaf chameleon has four siblings in the karsts of madagascar. There is B. desperata, the desperate leaf chameleon, and B. confidens, or the trusting chameleon, also B. micra, which shares a name with a Nissan but is not latin somehow?, and B. tristis, the SAD chameleon! B. tristis is even smaller than the DLC (desperate leaf chameleon). it’s no longer than a blackberry! the B stands for the Brookesia taxon, named for the guy who published about them first, probably, somebody Brookes, which is rude, because he only saw them hundreds of years after brown people who lived in the madagascan karsts. all i knew about a karst at first was i thought it was some type of forest. it sounds beautiful! icy and rocky. perhaps werner herzog’s middle name is karst. but it can’t be like that in madagascar. so i googled it. a karst is like this: “a landscape underlain by limestone which has been eroded by dissolution, producing ridges, towers, fissures, sinkholes and other characteristic landforms.” karsts look like space! you must google a karst and see it for yourself. it is like the barcelona of nature, like cactuses of stone sprouting from the ground. i have never been to barcelona, or a karst. i live in philadelphia. in case you are wondering, my obsession with reptiles started when my girlfriend left me. i’m gay. i made a tiktok about her leaving me to an audience of thousands, and received 348 likes and 58 supportive comments. the madagascan chameleon family was featured on somebody’s tiktok which is how i found out about them, scrolling at work in the wee hours of the morning. it was a tiktok about depression and climate change and how the madagascan karst chameleons were named for their sad state. i felt a rush to help my fellow creature, the DLC, and also a possessive urge towards another being that brings me great shame. i obtained one that had been bred in a canadian zoo, and named her elise without thinking about the fact that i had a coworker named elise. when i realized, i briefly considered renaming her lorelai, like the gilmore girl (well, technically both gilmore girls). my therapist asked me what elise b., my coworker, meant to me. she is somewhat aspirational, being married with babies, with a pin on her work badge that says SAVE ROE, and she wears red uggs to work which look comfortable and shocking also. the name elise also reminds me of eloise from the book, wild girl. she happens to have a turtle as well. why this made me name my lizard elise i have no idea. elise L. (i named her L. for lizard) sometimes makes me cry. i save my tears and moisturize her skin with them, which now that i’m saying it out loud sounds creepy as hell, but what can i say? some mothers have an urge to lick their babies. i tried on sweatpants i probably won’t keep without underwear. i was sad about one pair of pants, which was supposed to be a deep orange satin but was in fact a rusty soft chambray or something like that. not silky and shiny but dusty and wrinkled. they had had glamor in my mind, and a pocket where i fantasized about keeping elise but would never actually put her, but IRL they were gross. i’d wanted to feel like tallulah bankhead. i’m girly. elise is my little french fry. i love my cat but elise is my baby. i love her with a fervor i’ve never experienced before. she is so small it’s dizzying. i can’t stop thinking about her. i made a bumper sticker of her for my truck, which is old and red and faded. when i eat fries in the driver’s seat, melting the hot salt fat starch in my mouth, her little bumpy body is never far from my mind.