Sometimes all you can say is I Love You.
There are people, events, things, and animals in our lives, that change us. That make us think, make us better people. That brief pause, on which we seek to reflect, that infinitesimal moment that exists only for us, each of us, as individuals, in which our lives were irrevocably altered by the mere breath, sight, of something other than us. I have had that moment. Thrice. The day my son was born, the day I realized I was in love with a cat, and the day I felt jealous because my current fiancee was kissing another girl. (He wasn’t my fiancee yet.)
I have been many things in my life, a failure, a goddess, a genius, a giver…a taker. And so have you. How long does it take to realize how many thing in your life change, day to day. What you could have been, what you were, what you are now. How many people know you, really know the real you? Have been there for enough of it to see you as you really are? And can accept that?
That are with you when you love, and hate, cry, and laugh, when you want the world to end?
He has been with me through all this and more. He IS the reason I am still alive. I would have killed myself, and yet I felt the need to live for this animal as some would like to term it. I would have swallowed the pills and slit my wrists, the pain ran so deep…
Despite my own trauma, over the years…there has been one, and only one constant. The rumble of his purr, the feel of him against my chest, as I fall asleep, or lay on my bed, at any time. The only unconditional, honestly unconditional, unabashedly true love in my lifetime, more than even my son, is this cat.
Is that strange? I think not. We all long for love given freely. We want to grok each other wholly.
This is one of the most foreign concepts in our own limited reality…and one that I would not readily give up without a fight. So if it seems odd, to eat pasta so my cat can go to hospital, and go without shampoo, so he can have a fighting chance, well that’s because it’s love.
I would do it for another human just as readily and have. Have cared for those that weren’t family because they needed me. Knowing that when I get home, he is waiting for me. And that’s all the reason I need.
Because He Loves Me Too.
Laurel, I feel you and grock you on this. When Gericho died, I mourned harder for him than for any human I have known. He was there EVERY DAY for 19 years — no one, even parents and boyfriends can say as much. It has been over a year since he died and still I can cry for him. One reason I drifted away a little last year from friends was that I had to nurse him and then to help him die. We went on a journey towards his death together. Hundereds of words passed beween us in the last few weeks — all of them silent, understood. It was a privilege to be with him then, and all of the years before that. Anyway, I will cry now if I don’t stop but I know about being in love with a cat. I could live without friends, but not without cats. Weird? Maybe. Fuckit what people think. Anyway, give me a call because I can’t find your number — it is somewhere written on some paper in this mess of a house that I will never find.