The relationships we have are often very strange. If you spend a lot of time with any creature, the two of you get weird to the rest of the world. It just happens. Familiarity, to a certain degree, is the amount of weirdness you have with another living being. Couples or friends in pairs or more get more familiar with each other as they get weirder and more indecipherable to the outside world. This kind of mystery is part of the allure of intimacy.
Tragedy or times of great stress can cause these bonds to deepen or shatter. When you put any relationship into the crucible of stress, you can pull out something more beautiful than before, something broken, or something horribly disfigured. Although, since beauty is in the eyes of who holds it, maybe those horribly disfigured relationships are more beautiful.
Regardless of whether you like it or not, close relationships always have inside jokes, running gags, nightly routines, and morning rituals. Stuff that makes them less comprehensible to the rest of the world, or weird, in a way. Those odd things are the first that you miss when you lose someone. You can't go to sleep properly if you don't say goodnight to the person you lost. You hear something they'd really love and you want to share it but they're gone. When you first wake up and your feet hit the floor in the morning and your hand misses that furry head that's always there to greet you for a morning refill of their food bowl. You always used to rub their belly or they'd yell. This could be a person or a cat, you decide, but I'm thinking now of my cat that decided to go for a waltz the other day. He didn't tell anyone where he was going and he's not answering his cell phone.
Of course I have a special bond with my pets. It's not because I'm an animal lover. I guess I kind of am, but sometimes they're just so adorable who can resist their charms? I was certainly never a cat person, though. I was allergic to all manner of things in another life: cats, dogs, grass, outside maybe. I was a pretty sneeze-y teen but cats seemed to keep me sneezing even into my later years.
So it was, a few years ago, when I found myself in a position where I had to decide the fate of a pair of kittens. I took them, clearly, or I wouldn't be typing this now but I was duped into it with alcohol, sex, and pussy pics. Obviously, the pictures were of the kittens and they were simply two of the most adorable balls of fur I'd seen since the night before.
Where this pussy story gets a little dark is maybe a year or two after I took these kittens. They were full grown cats at this point and I even got a third through what was essentially the same trickery as before. He was still a kitten and the three of us hit a rough spot in life. The fruits of my second DUI were rotting in my lap, my grandmother (who was basically my mother) died, and my best friend at the time was a mad temptress. Often, my cats and I would just sit at home and drink alone. I liked the company and they liked all the treats we'd get when I drunkenly ordered delivery.
Maybe it's nice from time to time but like most things I do, I took these habits to excess. I drank a lot. I was fun-employed for over a year so I had tons of money. I lived in a shitty apartment, got fat unemployment checks, and a fat "you got fired" check from my old job, and me and the cats got fat on life. I was getting alcohol by the box and not the fancy kind like wine in a box but bottles of liquor put in boxes by the liquor store employee because he didn't want to put a dozen bottles in bags. That was just for the week, if it lasted that long.
Until, one day, I woke up to cats yelling at me. I was on the couch, and on my chest was Buddy, he's my fat cat and he's very furry. On the floor next to a huge puddle of brownish mostly dried liquid was Amiga, she's a princess and rarely yells at me but she was joining in the chorus. Nearby, next to a slightly smaller but still large brownish patch on the carpet and a broken water bong, was Choomba, the youngest member of my gang and exceptionally skittish.
The sun was shining bright in my window so that meant the afternoon was in full swing, mid summer put that amount of sun in the window at around 4:30PM. I had absolutely no idea what day of the week it was. The amount of traffic outside told me it was probably a weekday but I couldn't verify this because I had no idea where my phone had wandered. In addition to what I was slowly realizing were actually drying puddles of blood that I had vomited up the night before, I had dried blood all over my hands and arms. There was a huge gash on my hand and a trail of dried blood drops leading to the kitchen where it looked like I tried to flavor some Chinese food with my own red sauce instead of the sweet and sour.
Over the years I've gotten pretty good at sussing out what happens when I'm black out drunk and my best guess for what happened before I passed out was that I had just ordered delivery after realizing I didn't eat the day before (or for longer, the days were a bit runny back then) so I ordered food. I then got the food out of the bag, went for utensils and cut my hand somehow. There was a lot of blood in that drawer (which was still open) and then a bloody fork next to my cold dinner (or whatever meal it was). It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what drunk people get up to when they're in it to win it like I was. I probably got a few fork fulls in me before I realized I got blood all over my meal and then just gave up and went and passed out on the couch. At some point after that though, I definitely threw up blood.
Maybe you're thinking "WTF?" and, maybe you're right, but this isn't about me anyways. This is about my cats, those poor kittens were yelling at me to wake up because I had forgotten both of our foods. In the middle of the crime scene in the kitchen were three empty food bowls. See, I thought this was actually going to be a story where I didn't talk about how evil I was, but here we are with some incidental devilry. Maybe this was my rock bottom, but it was certainly a wake up call. I loved those little fuckers and I felt like a bag of mashed up assholes for letting them go hungry. Some might say they were just warning me I was about to get eaten, and those folks might be right but it was still mea culpa.
Maybe the whole vomiting blood thing had something to do with it (although that had happened to me before a few times), but I never went so hard after that. I didn't quit drinking at that time. I guess I technically still haven't quit drinking either, because I had a gin and tonic last week or the week before. I just don't go hard anymore, I'm not in alcohol to win anything anymore. Maybe I'm just finished with the shenanigans? I don't know.
That day was the day that I decided I needed to live. I had to take care of Amiga, Buddy, and Choomba. Those are the ABCs of why I didn't drink myself to death a few years ago.
Then, this past Sunday, Choomba decided to sign his own freedom papers and become an outside cat. I mean, he left and didn't tell me where he was going and when he'd be back. He's been gone since SUNDAY! What an irresponsible teenager! This is literally the first time he's ever been outside. He's been in a cat carrier twice and the second time I ended up almost as bloody as that morning I woke up after my drunken knife fight with my fried rice.
I got really emotional yesterday because it was the fifth day in a row we didn't have our morning routine. I smoke a pipe and he rubs his shoulders and cheeks on my legs while I scratch his head. He preferred the mornings where I would smoke two or three pipes and spend more time getting behind his ears and right above his eyes. I was out of sorts all day yesterday and I almost decided to get a bottle or two of liquor and see how fast I can make it disappear but then I thought about that day when they all woke me up for breakfast. I thought about how much Amiga and Buddy still need me to give them treats and belly rubs. I thought about how Choomba was certainly scared as fuck if he was even alive.
My cats mean more to me than anything in the world. After I told a friend this week about how one of them was missing, I shared how devoted I am to them and he questioned my sanity. I told him I'd run into a burning building to save them and I didn't care if I got hurt. But they're just cats? Society makes us think that type of behavior is acceptable if other people are at risk, like someone's children. Certainly, a human life is worth that type of risk but what about Choomba? Did someone's fucking kid save anyone's life? Anyways, just make another kid! I can't make any more cats that saved my life. However, I can certainly end any that try and hurt theirs. Maybe this sounds weird but I said that it would earlier, didn't I?
So after a rough day yesterday with my gang down to three quarter strength, I decided to just stay up and find Choomba. I've looked every night and morning this week for him but he's skittish and I was worried a bright flash light might scare him away (unless he was eaten by coyotes or got in a fight with a raccoon?). Before dark I got a fire going and had it nice and warm and inviting. Then I got a container of their favorite treats and just sat by the fire or walked around the back yard calling for Choomba for 4 hours. I was starting to get tired so I figured I'd go get a Pepsi to stay up past midnight and on my way down I see a dark figure sauntering across the yard.
It was Choomba and he looked surprised to see me! The sonovabitch has been out having the time of his life! He ate the treats and I forgave him for running away but he didn't want to come inside. He was a little scared so I gave him some more food and some water and went to bed with the door open in case he wanted to come back inside. He did not, I woke up again this morning without my morning ritual so the first thing I did was go back to where I left his water and food and I found him sleeping nearby under the log splitter with a feather hanging off his whiskers. There was some of a dead bird near his food and I assume the rest of it was in his belly. He's probably been eating birds all week and that might be the reason he went out in the first place. Birds, after all, are really stupid and they taste great.
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