When love comes along, real honest-to-God love, it's always a surprise.
I say this, sitting in my chair with a purring fuzzball of a spaz-cat curled on my arm and watching the cursor surreptitiously to make sure it doesn't make good its escape from the screen. Sitting and purring with his sense of appropriate grace and consort, knowing that this, now, is the place where he is needed most. I find myself scratching his ears and cooing, running tired fingers across the silken profile of his furry head, watching as his large green eyes slit into wells of condensed bliss and wondering that from that came this.
When we acquired the spaz cat, he was little more than an elegantly contrived wind-up toy, small enough to fit in a pocket or a palm and just as erratic and kinetic in nature. He whirred and whizzed and skittered and boinged, careening constantly and with utter abandon until his little body simply wound down and he flopped, careless and bohemian and easy on whatever surface he had landed upon-- floors, windowsills, toilet seats, laps, plants. He was utterly contained unto himself and completely self-absorbed-- unlike our serene, self possessed older cat who merely watched with zen-like peace and passivity, waiting for the perfect lap to present itself or the perfect wedging-space to appear between a leg and a sofa pillow. For the longest time he simply existed, like a pampered prodigy, as if his whims were what the world turned upon-- yowling and scheming and batting and sulking. And yet, among all of those things, there were small moments of connection which I never really recognized until he was gone for those four days a few weeks ago.
The house was quiet.
The older cat never made bones about it as such-- he just walked and searched, turning a cool liquid eye on me as if to say Somehow you have to fix this... this is not good, not balanced, not all right. And surprisingly, I agreed. For all of his self-absorbed mannerisms, there was a piece missing. And I started to realize that, even though he's feline, not human, there were certain kindnesses, certain relations with which he defined my existence.
When I wake in the early morning hours, surfacing from sleep into the heart-clenching, mind-warping throes of a panic attack, it is his furry paw which settles on my tear stained cheek and his wide liquid green eyes that search mine as he wedges into my shoulder, purring in my ear to say I am here... there are no words, but I *see* you, and I am here. It is he that comes and pats my arm in the wee hours of the morning to tell me I am being foolish, that sleep in necessary, and that someone notices my vigil through the long nighttime silence. It is he that distracts me from my ruminations, turning back flips and cartwheels and shadowboxing imaginary foes and real milk rings until I laugh and laugh, whereupon he feigns offense for only as long as I continue, performing a court jester's bow-stretch and curling over to show his belly in comic solidarity when I stop. It is he that eventually gives up, coming to rest wherever is the nearest touching place, so that I am not alone in my waking holding pattern. And it is he that keeps watch on the foot of my bed as I sleep fitfully into the daytime, facing away as if to circle the wagons and stay alert so that I may rest.
So you see, to me he is more than the kinetic furball everyone sees when they pass in and out of my door. He is constant, he is comic, he is companion.
From time to time I get a remark from someone I know that expresses incredulity that "people can feel that way about an animal." Lest you think that I'm evolving into a batty cat lady, I should clarify: I have only two, and they are quite sufficient. And that's really the point, isn't it? They are sufficient. They provide, as a good friend confided to me once, something missing in a newly forged home-- slapstick and attendance, mostly without judgment or comment.
And so it is that I write here of love. For all too long a time I didn't realize it, but I do love him as much as I do his older avatar and near-opposite, albeit in a different way. Ours is a relationship of active silences, passing affections, and dismissive respect: always overtly distracting, a game of smoke and mirrors, but always constant.
*And lest you should worry, nothing has happened to him, tests are still all mainly normal following the Lily Debacle, just doing a couple more this week to check up on things.
