I’m not crying, you’re crying!!
Couldn’t find the reblog button though all the tears in my eyes
Damn it all.
;__;These aren’t tears in my eyes….Nope…Dust…Totally dust or an eye lash..
DAMN IT ALL! I CRY LIKE A BITCH EVERY TIME!
Yeah I cried too
(told you about the bag-in-a-pond trope tho)
today’s unlock was all the places you could get walking on surfaces one paw wide
So, true story.
When I was starting 1st or 2nd grade, I got a cat. It had shown up as a ~6 month kitten at the patio door of a family friend, had a kink in its tail that the vet guessed was from being run over by a car tire, maybe one it had curled up to sleep under.
This cat was skittish as hell, if it had been socialized at all it was poorly, when I got to this family friend’s house we had to keep picking up pieces of furniture that it would try to hide under. I named it Freely, because “she ran around so freely”, and I was the kind of weirdo kid who would name a pet after an adverb.
She started out afraid of humans and it didn’t help that little kid me was like “pet! let’s play!” in a way that cats don’t really play, so her whole life she was distant and pissy. I went off to college, and then to LA and she stayed with my parents.
One year I was flying home for Christmas and my flight got cancelled because the plane was stuck under a blizzard in Denver or something, I got rebooked for two days on. Apparently I missed my last chance to see her because the next day my dad called to say she’d died, which wasn’t too sad because she’d always been distant and pissy.
So he asked what he should do with the body, options included putting it in the dumpster at his office, cremating it in the incinerator at his office, or burying it out in some woods by the country club, I asked him to do #3 because it seemed the most dignified.
Ha.
So, flew home, did Christmas, flew back, a few months later my mom calls me laughing her ass off. Apparently a cop knocked on her door around noon all seriously asking where my father was, she told him he was at the office and what was this about, cop just insisted he needed to talk to him, so she took a number and my dad called back when he came home.
Cop came back over and it turns out to be this: my dad went to bury Freely but the ground was frozen hard, the softest ground he could find was down by a creek so he dug as deep as he reasonably could (he was in his mid-60s at this point), buried her, and piled rocks on top to keep scavengers away.
But then the snow melted and flooded the creek up to its banks, the rocks and loose soil floated away, and this plastic bag with my dead cat inside floated several miles downstream until this dinky-ass creek passed over someone’s driveway at which point it beached, and this housewife coming out to get the paper encountered this rotten, waterlogged cat corpse stranded in the middle of her drive, freaked out, and called the cops. And as my dad hadn’t had the foresight to take off the collar and tag around her neck, it came back to him.
So there was this cop standing in the living room basically asking my dad if he had murdered my cat, possibly as part of a ritual to cast a spell on this random woman, while my father was just doubled over laughing in his recliner, the cop being all “this is a serious matter, sir”.
He was convinced and went away, and that’s how the best story about my first cat takes place months after her death.
So I told you I got this cat, I told you about that. How I got this cat from an ex-roommate who realized he couldn’t afford a cat, and I took it in, and he was so friendly and doglike. How every night he’d sleep in my lap and every morning when I was starting to wake up he’d ease me into it by coming up to cuddle in my armpit for five minutes and then burrowing under the covers with me. How when I was in the middle of a big transition and feeling pretty lonely he was kind of my rock of emotional comfort.
How I’d thought of him as a girl for a long time and now that I realized he was a boy and it was time to get him spayed I felt weird and decided to rationalize that it was a transsexual cat. That’d kind of fallen apart from being around roommates who knew the cat as a boy from the get-go, and I was wondering what to do now.
Well that doesn’t fucking matter now, because he’s dead. He went and got hit by a car in front of the house tonight. He was 8 months old.
And if that wasn’t poignant enough, I’d taken him back to my place in Pennsylvania for Christmas last year and my parents both bonded with him. They came into town for the week today and said hi to him. We went for a walk around the neighborhood and he followed me down the sidewalk a bit and then just waited looking after me. When we were done with dinner we came back, I took him inside and fed him, and then jumped in my parents’ car to get back to their hotel.
And before I got back home, my roommate called to tell me.
God fucking DAMMIT. I knew this was a possibility with outdoor cats, but everyone seems to keep outdoor cats around here, and he seemed to like it so much, and everytime I’d seen him crossing the street he’d waited for traffic to clear, but just God fucking DAMMIT, you know?
so I just got a kitten, without even intending to. she’s pretty sweet.
