Hello Kitty, Goodbye Kitty

I can't fathom a sadness like this clings without end, because if it did, I can't imagine anyone wanting to undertake it again.

I was in no business to be a pet owner. I was 20. And a full time college student. A full time sorority sister. A full time employee with a full time job. But I was also full of a lot of love too, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at Katie's Pet Depot one block south of Wilshire, and half a mile from UCLA, I'd walk, on my lunch hour, to visit the animals there in the window for adoption. It was soothing. An hour to myself, away from my sort of terror for a boss, and a terror of a world.

When asked if I'm a cat person, I say "I'm whatever my landlord will let me have in an apartment person." And in most places I've lived, those are cats.

I made smalltalk with dogs, and cooed at gerbils, softly petted bunnies in large circular glass enclosures, and talked up one, Sandy, who told me I needed a cat in my life. I hadn't thought I needed one, but she was Sandy, and who was I to tell this Sandy, and her adopted animals, I didn't need them.

They needed me, if anything.

Ok, I said, I'll take this one.

I drove back after work, picked up Sophie, and there we were, at home, pet owner and pet ownee. I was 20 and I'd never had my own pet. I'd had family pets, and if something belonged to me, reported directly to me, it was much more in the shape of a mouse or a frog or a turtle. Sophie was able to show me affection in a way I'd never experienced with Templeton my rat from age 8 through 10, or my mouse, who lived one evening before falling victim to my terribly cunning team of dog and cat. But Sophie was also able to show me, too, I wasn't enough. And after 3 months, she sent me out to find a pet, a companion, a cunning partner, for her.

I had been a pet owner and she a pet ownee for 3 months, so I didn't know how to procure a cat for my cat or a pet for my pet, so I started with the simple: I'd just tell people that's what I wanted to do. Universe, give to me what I ask. Through one coworker, and her mother, and my coworkers mother, and her coworker, came my coworkers mother's coworkers friend, and alas an address, somewhere deep down the 110 in the mountains of Pasadena.

There lived a cat, age unknown, only that she'd been pregnant before age of consent and delivered a litter herself. All living in the outside, mountains, fending for themselves. In a word we've learned never to utter, save for just saying "the c word" her entire litter was eaten by coyotes.

She knew sadness too early, and home, she so desperately needed.

"She likes you!" they said. While I'd come to learn, she liked everyone, that night I took her home, Madi Lynn I named her, and there began a 3 weeks of a mistake, I was sure I had made.

There was hissing, and hiding, and mean looks. "I got her for you, Sophie! Be nice!"

And just as everyone said, just as I was ready to turn around and drive her back up the 110, friends, fast friends they became. This apartment, and each one I had after, also became theirs.

I've always said a pet is the most interesting of friends, because they know you like no one else. They know you at your weakest and most vulnerable, they know you through years and a decade of your life, that you see mirrored back at you.

Your only obligation: take care.

And through college, 7 bosses, 3 jobs and 6 apartments, I tried.
And she, me.

There were these nights I was so full of energy I could not sleep, or days so low I needed love, and we'd turn on the music and dance.
And dance.
and dance.

A project, any project, she was there. She was there to provide absolutely no assistance. She sat on my hand as I wrote away. Attempted to write away. Laundry, a car wash, even a trip down the street to be noisy, she came with.

I slaved away, she rolled in the dirt.

It's in her absence, that I do what has to be typical, split my time with beating myself up, and mourning the loss.

I tried to give her away on more than one occasion.
We didn't get along.
She bossed me around.
If she wanted wet food in the middle of the night, she woke up to tell me.
She looked like a kitten, but she roared like a monster.
It's how she got away with murder.

She liked spicy tuna rolls
and flaming hot cheetos
wet food and dry food and every kind of food food
and on more than three ocassions she'd steal pizza right out of my hand.

So when I saw her Tuesday night, out of the corner of my eye, chatting away on the telephone, her shaking unable to walk, deplete of herself, I knew that emergency care she required. We ruled out kidney failure, and diabetes, hyperthyroid perhaps, but that would require more tests. It wasn't this, but maybe that, there was no way to be sure. She was pumped with IV fluids, and sent home, skinnier, and frailer than I'd ever seen her, in just a day she went from someone I knew, to no one any of us knew.

That night we slept side by side. Her eyes laid open, mine too. When I finally met sleep, she snuck away. I awoke that morning and searched the house. Every time I'd find her she'd find a new place to hide, be by herself, saying to me over and over she was ready to go.

I drove her to the vet.

You have three options, I was told. All of them require many tests, hospitalization, xrays. Poking and prodding galore. But her quality of life was gone. That won't ever return. She's ready to go.

I thought about my 20s, that big ol' chunk of my life, made better by her, if though most of it was me declaring we didn't get along. I couldn't let it be marred by me clinging to an inability to let her go.

She had made her choice. I just had to accept it.

There are things I would have done different. I could have been more patient. Probably not have offered her to every stranger and Jehovah's witness who came to my door. But what I never would have done different is have her as my friend. Or in saying hello, be afraid to say goodbye.