This is Monster. He followed me home one day when I was 17 and he was a few weeks old. He had a spot of white paint on his forehead and was very hungry, and he cleverly snuck in the front door ahead of me and braved the wrath of the other resident cats to get at the kitteh food.
I let him stay.
We’ve had some crazy adventures since then, like you do when you grow up from being 17 to being 31. He’s had to deal with boyfriends and babies and bad habits. We’ve moved more times than I care to admit to.
I know he won’t finish out this journey with me. That’s the way with cats; they only see you along for awhile, and then they move on to do Cat Business elsewhere.
But I’m not quite ready to say good-bye. I certainly wasn’t ready to have him steal out the door on Thursday night and just not come back.
Which is to say: it was a rough weekend. I surprised myself by turning out to be the kind of person who pretended nothing was wrong, thank you very much. I went kind of numb and couldn’t feel much of anything about anything. I had a lot to be happy about today, and I couldn’t celebrate. By today I’d gotten to a place where I couldn’t say his name aloud, couldn’t say the word death aloud.
Never fear, though, I had Rio to stoically and unemotionally say, “Why are you guys still looking for that cat? You know he’s probably dead by now or he would have come home.” Every time we looked for him. Which was a lot.
I know she cared, though, because she made up a game about a queen who went away from her people one day and no one knew if she had died or simply gone “Somewhere Else”. And then we had to spend the whole afternoon making a jeweled crown to lay by the queen’s grave to call her back to us.
Which I guess worked, because Martin came home in the evening with Monster in his arms. Suddenly I could feel things again, like the tears pouring down my face as I ran to hug him. Clearly he missed me, too – no joke – because he is not normally a huggable cat. The fact that he held still for several outtakes of this photo and I still have both my eyes speaks volumes.
He’s skinny and stinky, but basically unharmed. And never going out again if I can help it.
Related posts:
