The Lionhearted

I didn’t want a cat. I sat for a friend’s once, and their constant up-in-my-grillness was off-putting to my isolatory nature.

My aunt had cats; was/is the stereotypical cat lady, unmarried, living alone, 3 cats of circulation when one dies.

They’re nice and sweet sometimes, and good for petting. But all that fur! Forget it.

My ex had a cat. It was good enough, companionable enough, but there were so many things in his apartment that identified him as a cat-lover/owner: the framed New Yorker cover with a cat; a magazine about cats (that he swears his brother bought him as a gag-gift); the industrial vacuum meant for all that fur.

It took me almost a year to put up curtains in my last apartment, because to do so would mean that I couldn’t abscond in the middle of the night. I would have to unscrew it slowly, with meaning and intention; I was committed to something.

Commitment was the largest reason I didn’t want a cat. Not the commitment of keeping it fed and littered, but the commitment of caring.

My brain would go immediately to, “I don’t know how I could deal with its death.” The hypothetical death of a hypothetical cat. The consequences of feeling that deeply for anything frightened me.

And yet. During the time I was with that ex, I moved to Oakland from San Francisco for grad school, and I was living a bridge away from anyone I knew, and things were a little lonely here in my studio apartment.

After a side-track story I won’t tell now, I ended up adopting Stella from the SPCA. A green-eyed (no freaky yellow-eyed cats please!), silken, mottled brown/black two-year old cat.

She has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

She’s not an in-your-face’r. She’ll hang when she wants to, and over the 3 years we’ve lived together now, she began to sit more and more in my lap as I meditate in the morning or nap on the couch. Over time, we’ve grown more accustomed to one another; and over time I’ve gotten to see how much my love wants to express itself.

I say things that only my mother must have said to me in endearment. They come naturally and without thought, these names and phrases that I whisper to her, or chide at her. The sweetened names of love that were hanging out inside me until there was a vessel in which to pour them.

I didn’t want a cat.

I didn’t want the responsibility of love.

But it’s opened rooms in me where there were only walls.