Yeah, I know. Girl writes love letter to her cat. Girl will probably die alone.
But Mickalene Thomas Younger is not a lovable cat. She is what non-cat people would point to as evidence for their hatred, and she would hate them back. Because she hates everyone. Except for me and maybe my roommate. She likes to be near people but not to be touched by people. She hates dogs; she doesn’t understand the concept of other cats. She believes that her life mission is to murder plants. She’s such a city cat that grass short-circuits her brain. My first roommate wouldn’t let her into his bedroom, so she would scoop her fossilized poop out of the litter box and push it across the apartment and under his door. The one time we had a mouse, she caught it and then spit it out into a box and watched it run around terrified until my roommate cried. But this stupid jerk is the # 1 reason that I’m currently a living, nominally functional adult. Not therapy. Not inner peace. An 8-pound fuzzy twerp who knocks my toothpaste off the sink while I’m in the shower.
After a short sublet, I moved to a shitty apartment in Brooklyn. I was newly employed, but also barely functional. The stage of depression where tasks like showering take all of your energy. I was also regularly having unexplained allergic reactions because fun fact – anaphylactic allergies train your body’s neural pathways to believe that any stress = allergen.[1] Naturally, I was also convinced that I was totally fine. Plus, I had an apartment that allowed pets.
Micki was the last of a litter that a Rutgers professor and her partner had rescued from a parking lot in deep Brooklyn. She was the last because no one wanted her. She was a runt and her siblings beat her up and ate her food. When I went to bring her home, the professor had to dig her out of the electronics cabinet she was hiding in. At three months old, she fit in the palms of my hands, and I looked at her and thought “This cat is defective.”
For the first week she lived under my bed, peeing on things. The only thing she’d expressed any interest in was a brief jaunt to stand on Kyle Erf’s head and lick the inside of his ear. She was abused and she was afraid and she was traumatized. And together, slowly, we relearned how to live. Suddenly, there were consequences if I wasn’t basically functional – the cat didn’t eat. Or she pooped on the floor. It took a year for her to realize that the food was always going to be there, to stop bolting as much as her stomach could hold and then barfing it back up everywhere. She had to learn that there’s life without puke and I had to learn that if you don’t “feel like” cleaning up puke then the puke stays on the floor and you’ll probably step in it and that’s 100% your fault. Eventually, she grew up to be an almost normal-sized cat who can almost interact with other living things. I’m not sure what I grew up to be, but I did relearn the whole showering thing.
Maybe it would be nice to have a cat who understands affection as something other than sitting three feet away and looking in the other direction. Maybe it would be nice to have a cat that sounds like an animal and not a demented squeaky toy.[2] But this asshole and I, we saved each other.
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[1] It turned out that I was allergic to the shower in that shitty apartment
[2] Underdeveloped runt vocal chord