Cat Person

Okay. This has actually been on my to do list forever. Like, in the beginning days of The Faggot Witch Whenever, I did record some of the stories as readings and I've been wanting to do it every single time so that people could just subscribe to that and listen to it if they didn't feel like reading or if they want it to be read to or whatever the reasons are. And then I thought I was gonna make a bot like you can subscribe to softwares that you feed audio of yourself into and then it makes a little bot of your voice and so I was gonna have like bot me read them. Anyway, I'm just gonna read this because I'm kind of a Luddite and this is from my friend Riviera who yesterday was like, I saw you got your kiddie story out, and I read up to the first part of it because that's as far as I read things, that's real.

So here we go. I got my glasses on like a Trampo. I got my computer next to a bunch of bananas on my little dinette table in my RV. And this is Cat Person. Let yourself be loved for fuck's sake.

Are you ready? My tattoo artist asked as he always does before puncturing me with a needle thousands of times. Usually I say, yep. This time I exclaimed, to be a cat person? He laughed.

I'd commissioned him to draw a portrait of my cat and he was about to etch it forever into my arm. I had so many tattoos already, but I couldn't believe this one was really happening. I never saw you as a cat person, my mother said when I got Thomas two years ago. Neither did I, said my friend Ryan, but now I can't see you without one. When I was a kid, we weren't allowed to have a cat.

My father was allergic. Once a family down the street was feeding milk to a found kitten and when I walked over, there it was, barely standing, tiny and adorable outside their back screen door, the first I ever laid eyes on. I can't imagine anyone laying eyes on a kitten like this and not wanting one, but I definitely did. It was a hard no. My father talked about his dangerous, asthmatic reactions as a child, and I wonder if on some level that made me want a cat even more, if even now having a cat makes me feel safer.

I'd been inside the house of the family down the street before too. The room of their little girl felt like a place no one got raped. But you don't need to wish your father was dead to love Thomas. I hate cats, I used to say, Maybe because I too turned out to be violently allergic. Maybe because once cats grow up, they can be so boring.

More likely, I think I couldn't deal with the grief of being denied one. I usually hate cats, I started saying after I met Thomas, with whom I was immediately taken. In the 2023, I was sitting in the outdoor smoking tent at Wolf Creek Radical Fairy Sanctuary. There's a lot of scare quotes around those words, and if you've read the one ever, you've seen the story about it and there's a link to it in this piece. He sauntered over and jumped up onto my lap, pressing his nose and mouth into mine, and I was fucking in love.

For the rest of the week, I would notice him, maybe I was looking for him, in the distance as he trotted across the vast open acreage, his movement mesmerizingly jaunty, free, confident professionals unfailingly call him when I take him to the vet, but he is so sensitive to a product of much trauma, desperate to attach to as much safety as he can. Someone once said, The two of us were exactly alike. I returned to Wolf Creek a few months after my first visit. Thomas started crouching under my RV just out of view, patiently waiting to dart inside anytime I opened the door. He roamed the 80 acres there like the king he is then, the very outdoor traveling cat of my transient then boyfriend.

But it's so cozy in here, and he appreciates peace and good textiles. I like to think that he also appreciated my energy and that which I cultivated in my space. Eventually, I stopped shooing him back outside. He curled up in the captain's chair and spread out across the dinette bench. My boyfriend and I eventually started leaving him inside alone, hard to sleep in the afternoon when we went out.

One night, I shocked myself by letting him leap onto my bed. Growing up, we had a string of dogs when I was in grade school, but they were not allowed in our bedrooms. So I had never let a pat onto one of my mattresses before, The first time Thomas jumped onto mine, walked up my chest, and stared into my face. There is an adorable picture of him here just being black and white in tuxedo and staring into the camera if anybody wants to see pictures of Thomas. What could I do?

I petted him, running my hands down his little cat body, marveling at the newness of the experience while freaking out that cat hair was gonna get on my sheets. He wasn't activating my cat allergy, which doctors say pass only rarely and mysteriously. After I let him onto my bed a few times more, I stopped caring about pet hair, caring only about his presence, a stance I'd never understood. How did people not mind that everything in their houses had pet hair on it? I'd always wondered.

But suddenly, I was struck by the not minding, a cat loving streak of lightning. There was a dog shaped hole in my heart that I didn't even know was there, my friend Cody told me a few years ago when he got a new dog. I understood the sentiment, like, cognitively. I understood that he was full and complete in some way he hadn't been before, but I did not understand how that was possible. Recently, was watching Love is Blind UK, a show in which, if you're unfamiliar, people can choose to get engaged with strangers they've been dating through a wall for a few weeks and have never seen.

If they do get engaged, they get to meet their betrothed and reveal that takes place in a weird long hallway, after which many of them say, best moment of my life. Jesus, I think every time that is the best moment of their life, meeting a person they'd talked to like a dozen times. But watching the second or third or maybe even fourth person say this, I suddenly wondered, what was the best moment of my life? And then I thought and felt totally bonkers for thinking it was when I met Thomas. I begged my parents for our first dogged Not just begged, screamed, which was not a thing I otherwise dared to do.

I was obsessed, obsessed with dogs. Every week the teachers in our grade school took our class to the musty little school library and every week I walked straight to the same section and took out a non fiction book on caring for dogs, though I did not have one. I would copy word for word the text of the books into notebooks by hand with pencil, not being old enough yet to use pens. When I'd exhausted the small dog section at the school library, I remember asking the librarian several weeks running if there were any more dog care books I started taking out the books at our much bigger city library and copying the text out of them too. I was deflecting.

I was projecting my utter dehumanization of being treated like a dog by a child rapist into a total fixation with how I care for them. I prized my notebooks full of pirated intel. One was a pink notepad inside a puffy cream colored cover that had a cool velcro closure, one of my most beloved possessions. When it ran out of pages, I had to start using a regular spiral bound notebook. This went on long enough that I became old enough to use pens.

What was it about being a kid and you had there was like an age limit for using pens? Anyway, when I'd gotten through all the non fiction books I was forced to resort to the child friendly fiction books about pet ownership, not a quality genre at the time. I read but didn't copy them because they didn't contain the information I needed to someday be the best dog owner the world had ever seen. Enter dog supply catalogs. I don't remember where I got my hands on one, but it was the most exciting thing I owned.

All those color pictures and descriptions of dog accoutrement, beautiful beds and sweaters and bowls and all being used by beautiful dogs, all those beautiful houses, certainly not the sort of place where people got raped. The dog models had names in their photo captions and I stole them for a list of potentials I was keeping. Pepper felt especially upscale and excellent for my eventual dog. I kept another list of the items I wanted to buy and another of my favorite breeds. My father had a thing for Weimreiners, always commenting on how gorgeous the one tied up in a neighbor's yard was, so I pretended to favor them too, feeling like they were my best shot.

Though really, I wanted a beagle. Finally, desperate, one year I staged a silent protest ahead of Christmas time, refusing to speak to my parents unless it was to repeat that the only thing I wanted was a dog. I did not maintain my resolve. I pitched some epic fits, a thing I was, again, usually too terrified to do, but suddenly couldn't stop myself from doing. I even dared to scream I hate you over it once as I stomped up the stairs, and I remember the thrill of getting away with it, cold and electric inside my rib cage.

I imagine that my parents, or my mother at least, having no context, must have been baffled over this virulent dog mania that had consumed me, the well behaved one. I believe my father truly believes himself innocent of his crimes now. It's not uncommon for people to block actions that don't align with their idea of themselves in ways both big and small. But at the time, they were still occurring, so I wonder if he did remember then the way he and a fellow pedophile named Frank had locked me in Frank's collie's cage. They threw a blue towel over it like I was a bird that needed shutting up while another younger child screamed.

My parents did not get me a dog for Christmas But one spring after I'd given up, after we'd stopped at the pet store on the way home from church, one Sunday, and Ood and Ood over the Cocker Spaniel puppies in the window, my father left for an errand. When he returned, he walked in the back door, holding its little body in one hand, which he extended toward me. I couldn't connect to our first dog, Sherlock. My mom named the tiny Golden Spaniel who arrived in our house always sniffing around as if for clues. He was terrified of men, especially my father, melting down every time he walked through the same door he'd brought Sherlock in to begin with.

It started to piss off my father who took it personally. I wonder if at least subconsciously he found the dog's terror appropriate. Me, I tried to make Sherlock my best friend like people do, but he was aloof and uninterested like too many other people in my life. I cried hard but briefly with everyone else when he died, in surgery I was told following his euthanasia after years of relentless medical issues. The replacement puppy, also a golden cocker spaniel, whom my mother named Watson, turned out to have violent blood spewing epileptic seizures within days of our bringing him home and was handed over to a vet nurse.

I imagine for euthanasia as well. The dalmatian we got later was too energetic for the amount of attention she got in her house and was rehomed. I have dog triggers, I tell people now. My last boyfriend, Thomas's custodian at the time, had a giant poodle and he smelled strongly of dog. The day my ex and I did mushrooms together, the first thing I felt was how hard my nervous system was working, had been working, to deal incessantly with the aroma which smells first to me like rape and degradation and shame and second like death, separation, loss.

There's a little video embedded in the story here of teeny tiny kittens, if that interests or assists you in any way. Four years ago when I became suicidal in a way that felt final, irreconcilable, not for the first time or last time, but for the closest time to fruition, a cousin came through the Bay Area. I was about to run out of money to keep my apartment and was looking for an RV so I wouldn't become street homeless. We sat on the back deck of my extraordinarily expensive rental looking over the rolling hills of Marin and she cried big unapologetic tears as she begged me to stay alive. We'd met only a couple of years prior, but she was the only relative with whom I was in touch aside from my mother, and the only one who ever wept for my life.

You should get a pet, she said. People had been telling me this for years, the ones who worried I wouldn't make it, who worried I was too lonely when I kept separating from husbands and boyfriends. I told her I'd been considering a cat. One had started circling my place every day, mewing quietly but lengthily, making me wonder if it was a sign. My landlord eventually scared it off with a hose.

I'd almost brought it inside, but couldn't imagine how I'd handle a cat when I still hadn't found a place to live. My cousin encouraged me over and over to get one anyway. After she left, she sent me a video of kittens a friend of hers was giving away. All I want is two nose piercings and a cat, I towed some redwoods in a Santa Cruz RV park soon after, after finding my RV just days before I had to leave my apartment. I was surprised to hear myself say it.

It's so simple and weird and specific. I already had the piercings. How long had I been harboring the desire for a cat? You don't get everything you want, the Redwood said. So I stopped looking.

Thomas was being attacked. My ex had another cat which suddenly started assaulting Thomas. It had been going on for a while before I returned to Wolf Creek, but it was getting increasingly violent and Thomas increasingly desperate when I was there. As soon as he climbed into their lidded litter box, the other cat would jump on top of it, reach into the hole, and claw at Thomas while he couldn't escape. While the cat spent all day roaming outside, the coyotes and winter cold made it necessary for them to sleep in my ex's cabin with us.

Thomas would wake us up in the middle of the night by leaping onto our bodies and scratching at the window directly behind my head, frantic like a coke fiend, a starved person, a hostage. My ex said he'd never done that before and locked him in the cold kitchen with the litter box alone where he'd scratch at the door for a long, long time before finally conceding to using it. He's sleeping, by the way, in a loft, like, over the driver and passenger seat, which I call the bedroom. He's just, like, dead asleep. I keep thinking he's gonna like poke his head up because I say his name like every ten seconds.

What if you guys didn't have to oh my god, sorry. It's my laundry! I can get it in a second. What if you guys didn't have to separate? My ex asked me when I was leaving for a few days and I said I was going to miss him.

Thomas had started coming to me, running to me when my ex and I returned from errands even though, as my ex put it, you don't even feed him. So I took him partly to keep him safe and partly because Thomas and I were clearly in love. We did the same thing again soon after when I was leaving for a longer period of time. Eventually my ex and I broke up and he conceded that Thomas was better off with me. From shortly after we met, I had been so afraid of losing him.

Now I didn't have to. And now I could do exactly the thing I've always watched people with pets do that I never wanted to do project my neuroses directly onto this feline. I worried that he'd be miserable inside my house, parked too close to a road to let him roam after having the run of 80 acres all day long. I took him on long meandering walks where I put him on a leash but followed him wherever he wanted to go his time to be in charge. Still having once been enslaved myself, I worried that I was keeping him too captive.

Is it enough? I wondered. Those supervised visits with nature where he very slowly sniffed and dawdled and ultimately, hopefully, chose a place to go to the bathroom. While he wouldn't, has never shit on my floor or in my sink or throw up or do any of the other messy expulsions some people's cats do. He doesn't want to go in his litter box, and so if I didn't take him out, he held it.

Would he rather be killed by a car after five minutes of freedom than be stuck inside with me? I agonized over it, but I never let him out alone, asking myself the same questions over and over even as I followed him dutifully on his long daily walk. Am I doing enough? I wondered. Really, I was wondering always, am I enough?

You make me excited to get up in the morning, another suitor said on another reality marriage show and I thought, oh god. I'd recently starting that thought started having that thought about my cat. About a cat. Turning in for bed one night, I'd suddenly brightened while realizing that in the morning, Thomas would either be sleeping next to me or climbing my body to wake me up, and I wasn't sure which, but I was looking forward to the next day in a way I never had before. And I thought even then, for a cat?

I've had many people express to me before that their pets dogs usually were not just a factor in their will to live, but the factor. The biggest one despite also having spouses. But when I saw these people taking care of their pets, all it looked like to me was a colossal pain in the ass. So much work. The feeding and the veterinarian ing and walking and cleaning and stuff purchasing.

When I heard years ago that another friend's cat woke him up way too early before work, every single morning, I'd found it unfathomable that anyone would live like that. Thomas has many mornings sauntered up my body and stood expectantly on my chest before I was ready to wake up. Many times during the first year and a half, I immediately had a meltdown about how tired I was and would be for the rest of the day, vestiges of the panic I felt as a child who knew my escape would be to do well in school, however exhausted, kept up by my father or the other men he brazenly brought into our house, my bedroom, at night. But even with that trauma activated, I'd still find a way to pet Thomas for a minute, then roll over to go back to sleep, often with him along with me. Precious, precious moments.

Yes, I do feel weird about it. That it feels more precious to me that Thomas will go to sleep with me than it does that any of my romantic partners have. But there is a specialness to our meeting in rest one common language between this domesticated animal and another less domesticated animal. There have been mornings or middle of the nights that he wouldn't stop prancing around on top of me, which was violating and terrorizing being attacked and kept awake in my own bed like that. He stepped right in one of my eyeballs before, which I imagine had to be where pink eye came from, and put his dirty feet in my mouth.

In our first several months together, I ran myself ragged trying to give him whatever he wanted, and the more I gave him exactly what he wanted, regardless of how much I didn't want to do it, the less satisfied he became. I've had boyfriends like this. After a while, I noticed that bending over backwards for Thomas's every demand only made him, like those boyfriends, more of a jerk. I'd been in this relationship dynamic before and so I stopped. I started ignoring him and started saying no and he started complaining this.

We live on a farm now that's protected enough for him to roam. I'm happy that he has his freedom. He really does pretty much whatever he wants, But as much as I often did not want to take him on his daily walks at the other farm, occasionally making him wait hours of looking at me expectantly, patiently as he refused to use his litter box, our rambles often ended up being the best part of my day. I experienced him experiencing the farm differently than I did, following him around, laughing as he leapt at some smell or inched bravely toward the horses. I'm gonna take you outside, I said to him once as I put on my boots to concede to his special needs because I'm obsessed with you and that's okay.

Are you ready? My tattoo artist asked two years after Thomas started living with me as he prepared to ink him into my arm. To have Thomas forever by my side? I am. Usually.

That night, I petted him, kissing his ultra soft black fur. It often smells inexplicably of incense, my temple cat from another lifetime. You make everything worth it, I said to him. Weeks later, I was panicking that I should rehome him. It still happens sometimes.

I get activated and feel like he doesn't love me enough because he doesn't cling to me like a hungry puppy. It reminds me how much of my life I felt like no one did. But on this farm, he has many other human companions who adore and dote on him. He's surrounded by love, but he still loves me. He has choices, but still he comes home every night.

He's pleased to sleep with me, though I've never had sex with him, and that's not something I've ever experienced either. I don't deserve this, I thought while brushing my teeth the other night, getting ready to lie down with this beautiful cat in my beautiful bed. All the ways I was taught I was wrong and unworthy, Thomas was the first being that made me feel otherwise. I still struggled to accept it sometimes two years on, but apparently there was a cat shaped hole in my heart and clearly it's filled. You can see a picture of that tattoo completed also at the bottom of this story.

Okay. I just did that, and if you're hearing me say this, you just listen to it. So I hope you enjoyed and that you're well wherever you are. Love you. Bye.