Lingering in Doorways

I love my cat.

This is an understatement. I loooooove my cat, six big fat Georgie-shaped o’s. I love that I have a cat, that I get to say things like “I love my cat,” or even “my cat,” which is of course not to say that Georgie is mine, that I own him, because really it’s more like he owns me. I talk about Georgie like a mom talks about her children, i.e. he’s all I talk about, I have exhausted all other conversation topics in my already-limited arsenal. Like: I can explain, in astonishing detail, the science behind his sleeping positions (belly-up or bread loaf? Ihavephotoswannasee), or our shared language of chin scratches and very-slow-blinks, but I can’t, for the life of me, talk for a second about what I did this week. Which is maybe more of a me problem? The point is, I am a Changed Person now, I am, for all intents and purposes, A Mother, and earlier today, lying very still while Georgie’s claws murdered my scalp and his giant tail went smack across my face, aggressive enough to shoot fur up my nose and trigger a seizure-like sneezing fit (I am, in fact, slightly allergic to cat fur), I thought, with great conviction: God. I love my cat. Also: WTF?

I’ve lived on this earth long enough to know that this is a sentiment true of most pet-human relationships. My family has, for as long as I can remember, been an animal-loving tribe — I have four furry cousins and a fourteen-year-old two-legged Godzilla I call my brother. We have never had a cat of our own. We have once had Ming-Ming, who would eat our food and sometimes sleep in our spare kitchen, but he was more like a passing visitor, not yet part of the family. Between him, the strays wandering our high school campus, and the nightmare that bit my lola in the foot and had her rushed to the hospital three summers ago, the sum total of my experiences with our feline friends had been disappointingly lacking. I did not not like cats, but I’d never known one personally enough to form any kind of opinion. It seemed, in those years, that I would never have the chance to.

That is, of course, until Georgie came in, except he wasn’t Georgie then. Back then he was just the surprise promised by Mom the week of my bittersweet not-grad last July. I remember thinking he was so strange, this small, scrappy, skinny-legged creature, all rigid angles and Einstein fur. He shambled out of his transit, a plastic dog carrier that dwarfed him, and into the living room, slinking under tables and chairs, and we followed, rapt, cooing after him. The spell finally broke at midnight, when he slotted himself in a corner of my room and took this colossal dump by the bed, and I lied, maybe I don’t do cats after all, maybe I should have just asked for cash and set it towards something useful, like a book.

Just kidding, of course. I fell instantly in love.

We learned all about him those first few days. He was a slow walker but a highly efficient pouncer, and he would purr so intensely his entire body would vibrate. Naming him was a process that took much longer than we expected; the ones I’d drawn up felt wrong or else were strongly vetoed by the other members of the household (whose own picks, for the record, had to resemble some kind of baked dessert). In the end we settled on neutral ground, mostly because we were tired of the clucking it took to get his attention. Georgie fit. He warmed up to the sound of it easily. In those earlier days, while I was battling the allergic reactions, you could hear the high-pitched song of it reverberate through the house. We loved his big eyes and sweet, insistent meows; we loved his little quirks, like how he loved the sound of the piano, and would perk up immediately to clamber over the keys. He was, in so many ways, our daring little boy, and we were eager to shower him with all our love and attention.

But no one, not even my mom, adored him like I did. Georgie clung to me like a limb. Pre-Georgie, those first few months of lockdown, I’d been battling with depression that I didn’t know how to voice — one that made me want to hide from the world. I dealt with it the only way I knew how, which was to spend my days wallowing in bed. Having a cat, an actual living creature that depended on me, gave me more than something to fill my time with; I had a friend, albeit non-verbal, who kept me company when no one else could. We shared a pillow. He slept on my laptop while I wrote. I would watch a movie and he would pounce up in my lap, just as engrossed, and we would doze off in the middle of it together. He would curl up in my hair, on my chest, by my feet; we would read together, and he would stare and paw at the pages like he actually understood them. And at night, when the panic attacks came, he would claw at my door and demand to be let in. There was no breakdown he didn’t witness, no ache he didn’t come running to soothe. 

I never understood the saying that pets take after their owners until I had Georgie. It seemed, in some strange, unknowable way, that he was me if I grew a tail. But I felt it, in his piano playing, in his literature loving. One time, while he was wearing his white knit cat sweater, I caught him rifling through the Parasite script I’d printed out and stealing from my Honeydukes tea, and I was so struck by the parallel of it that I actually let out a gasp. I remember being so filled with gratitude just then, for this mysterious creature that wormed its way into my life and made a home in it, who borrowed my room and my things and my habits, who coaxed out of me affection I didn’t know I had. I love him, I love him. He doesn’t know how much.

Which is bittersweet, knowing now how this story ends. I’m editing this in June 2023, after going through my old blog drafts in the hopes of something to salvage, and I felt my heart drop when I saw this wedged in between. Last August, a week after I moved back to Merville after a year of living with my other set of grandparents, Georgie slipped out the back door while it was thundering out and never returned. For months I prayed desperately for some explanation, endured the agony of waiting for any sighting of him, until eventually the hope crumbled and I gave in to cold hard truth. I learned a lot about loss that year, about how it’s the not knowing that destroys you. I learned a lot about regret. There were so many things I could’ve done right, so much time wasted. It’s so easy for the things we love to slip out of our lives forever.

But I’ve also learned other things, while writing this again. That inevitability was what made our time together so special. The knowledge that he existed beside me, that our lives crossed, and that once in my lifetime I had a cat named Georgie that slept in my bed and loved me — it’s almost enough. I think we’re connected still, by something that transcends time and language and species, even. And I hope, so sincerely, that he really is just out there in the world, having wondrous cat adventures and eating well and finding his tribe. I hope he knows that, as long as I am living, he will never be alone. I hope he knows.