The House I Thought I Knew
How a tiny hamster changed the way I see the world.
A few days ago, my niece forgot to lock my Winter White dwarf hamster’s cage after playing with him.
So Tofu escaped for the third time.
Tofu is tiny, with completely white fur. Normally, all I have to do is call his name once, and a little white head appears. Within seconds, he comes running towards me.
But that day, the house was completely silent.
I called his name over and over again. I knelt on the floor with a torch, searching beneath every piece of furniture.
Nothing.
As the hours passed, I couldn’t stop imagining the worst. Had he fallen somewhere? Was he hurt? Would I ever see him again?
Tofu is incredibly small.
Small enough to reach places that I never could, and places I had never even noticed.
Almost twelve hours later, I called his name one more time. This time, he quietly wandered out of the bathroom as if nothing had happened.
The first thing I did wasn’t scold him.
I picked him up and carefully checked every part of his tiny body, relieved to find that he wasn’t injured.
Only then could I finally breathe again.
Yet what stayed with me wasn’t his escape. It was everything I discovered while looking for him.
I had always thought I knew this house well. After all, it had been my home for years. Until that day, I noticed a narrow gap beneath the bathroom cabinet that I had somehow never seen before.
To me, it was little more than a crack.
To Tofu, it was a tunnel.
To an ant, it might be a valley.
Then another thought came to me.
For Tofu, are the lines between the floor tiles like endless white plains? Is the space beneath the sofa a vast cave stretching far beyond what I could imagine?
The house had never changed.
Only the scale of the observer had.
Suddenly, I realised that the same house could contain completely different worlds.
Perhaps we often assume that we all live in the same world. Perhaps we simply share the same space.
Every living creature enters it through the scale of its own body.
We cannot see ultraviolet light.
We cannot hear ultrasound.
The microscopic world has always existed—simply too small for our eyes to perceive.
The distant universe has always existed too—simply too vast for our everyday experience to comprehend.
Not seeing something has never meant that it does not exist. But the thought that stayed with me the longest was something else.
I have always tried to give Tofu the best home I could. Soft bedding. A warm little house. A running wheel. Toys. Fresh food and clean water.
I honestly believed I had given him everything he needed. Yet this was his third escape.
If I had truly given him everything he wanted, why did he still leave?
That was when I realised something I had never questioned before. I had never really tried to think like a hamster. I had only imagined, from a human perspective, what a hamster’s life ought to be.
To me, his cage was a safe and comfortable home.
To him, perhaps it was simply a place to return to after exploring a much larger world.
Perhaps the desire to explore is simply part of who he is.
Not courage.
Not rebellion.
Just instinct.
The happiness I thought I was giving him was simply my understanding of happiness.
If our bodies determine the world we are able to enter, perhaps our instincts shape the world we long to explore.
Almost twelve hours later, I found Tofu again.
But somehow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the one who had truly lost his way that day wasn’t him.
It was me.
I had become lost somewhere between the world I imagined and the world he actually lived in.
For most of my life, I thought of the body as nothing more than a vessel for living in the world. Until that day, I realised that it quietly determines what I can see, where I can go, and even what I am capable of understanding.
Perhaps we all live in the same universe.
Yet each of us can only ever step into the part of the universe that our own body allows us to experience.