Hello lovelies,
Well, after our month of abortion care essays, I figured we could lighten things up a bit over here at Our Bodies: Ourselves. While we’re at it, dontcha wanna send this along to your favorite person with a body? Or person with a cat?
The following is an essay I wrote during mine and Joni’s first year together. Enjoy!
Written Fall 2022
I think sometimes that the neighbors who share my bedroom wall must think I’m in an abusive relationship.
“Fuck, Joni!”
“STOP!”
“Goddammit, that HURTS!”
Play aggression, they call it. She never learned that claws and teeth hurt, separated, as she was, from her family. Too soon. My legs are covered with the evidence, claw marks, bite marks.
I can’t afford a second cat, or a cat behaviorist, so I google.
“Play with your cat twice a day,” it says. She’s not an asshole, she’s just bored. But I would argue that my cat is, fundamentally, both bored and an asshole.
See also: predator, villain, pouty princess, imperious judge, chaos goblin, licker of egg yolks and cheese puff dust. Incidentally, she is also my roommate, the being I spend the most time with by a long shot. My napping companion. My familiar. My first thought when the fire alarm blares. My emotional support animal and my best friend.
I learned that boredom is behind most problem behaviors when I set up the automatic feeder during our first summer together. (It is not, I learned, behind the problem behavior in which she sits contentedly, purring on my chest, until some indiscriminate moment when she chooses to bite my face. That’s petting aggression, folks, and there is literally no solution to the problem. You just have to put up with your face being periodically bitten.)
I thought she had begun meowing at sunrise because she was hungry, but even with exactly 30 grams of expensive prescription weight-loss food dispensed by a robot at exactly 6:30 am—still, her face right up against the crack between the door and the floor, a plaintive paw poking through. She throws her mewling voice across the room like a classically-trained actor.
It’s not that I don’t play with her. She loves the rope game, where I flick a rope to and fro. (Read rope as: broken pair of headphones, robe sash, end of a ball of yard) (The headphones are broken because she broke them.) She lays on her back, paws wheeling in the air, trying to catch it, bring it to her mouth, bite. Or, if she’s standing, sometimes she’ll jump, all four paws in midair. Circus trick. We do that a lot when I’m in Zoom meetings. Often Zoom meetings that I’m leading. (Like, therapy.)
It’s just that sometimes I am gone from sunrise to sunset. Sometimes I am sleeping off a 3-a.m. call from the emergency line. If my neighbors who share my bedroom wall think I’m in an abusive relationship, the ones who share the stairwell landing just think I’m in a codependent one. “Hi baby!” I toss into the apartment as I unlock the door at 11:15 pm, or 7:20 am, or 10:45 am, or 3 pm, or 9:45 pm, having just cared for humans for 8, 10, 12 hours. I get meowed at: “Welcome home,” or “I missed you,” or “Where the fuck have you been?” I always pick her up, hold her on my right shoulder, pet her smooth back, press my ear to her chest and feel its purring until she squirms and I let her down. That’s when she attacks my legs, sometimes.
The night after I care for humans for 10 hours and then sit in my car for another hour as my partner tells me the impossible news—that Luna, his precious dog whom I love very much, will die tomorrow—I come inside weeping. No small feat on low-dose Lexapro. (I used to cry at the drop of a hat. Maybe it was better that way.)
Joni lets me hold her for longer than usual. I tell her, “You can never ever EVER die,” ask her to promise. She only purrs.
I let her sleep in my room that night. I’m reminded why I usually kick her out at bedtime when I wake to four paws on my chest. (“The paws of fear / upon your chest / only love can soothe that beast,” the Indigo Girls sing.)* Cat nostrils blowing two tiny streams of cool air on my cheek. At 4 a.m.
I read somewhere (on the internet) that cats think humans are dead, when we dare to sleep for eight consecutive hours, since they have to wake up cyclically to eat and groom. And they think we’re big, stupid cats. So maybe she was checking that I was still alive.
I shove her off, roll over. “Still alive,” I grumble, and she settles down to snuggle into a warm furry ball at the bend of my knee for a little while.
She’ll check again in an hour, just to be sure.
With love,
Liddy and Joni, who has chilled out a bit now that she has a backyard.
*Go see the Indigo Girls’ beautiful documentary!
Hi Liddy,
I love hearing more about Joniand that oh so complex love cats offer us, puny humans!