No One Asked for This

by Cazzie David

  After whoever it is falls asleep first, which they always do even though my one very reasonable request is that they not fall asleep before me, I’ll stay up for hours hating myself for sabotaging my alone time that I would have surely used wisely. I would have watched the movie said friend didn’t want to watch, got some writing done, maybe I would have whipped up a soufflé—who knows; the possibilities are endless. But, alas, when I’m finally left alone again, even the aforementioned activities can’t stop me from diving down into the depths of hell where my disturbing thoughts reside.

  So the cycle repeats. I start texting everyone I know to see if they want to come over and distract me by giving me something else to think about—how much I wish to be alone.

  One year, when I was still in Boston, the continuous ruminating got particularly bad and the temporary company was also bad (nonexistent), so something had to be done. After evaluating my options, it seemed there were only two that could really make a difference: go on anxiety medication or find someone to hang out with who would never leave and also not annoy me. But as long as that person was able to talk, chances were they’d annoy me.

  So I got a cat. I’d heard they gave pets to mental patients and that it could make a world of difference. Plus, I figured I could easily take care of a cat. They bathe themselves, they basically use a toilet, they don’t even need to go on walks, which is perfect because I don’t go outside. Yes, I bought the cat. I’M SORRY!!!!!!!!!!!! I tried to get a rescue but it just didn’t work out. I didn’t end up connecting with the only two they seemed to have in the entire city. They were both pretty old, which is sad, but, like, I wanted a kitten, okay? I needed us to grow together. This was for my anxiety. It was about saving me, not saving a cat. (I still feel terrible and am horrified to admit this, in case that wasn’t clear.)

  It had always been a dream of mine to have a Bengal cat because they look like mini-tigers and having a mini-tiger is sick, even though it screams “I DIDN’T RESCUE THIS ANIMAL.” I found a Bengal breeder in Massachusetts and sent her an e-mail. Not long after, I got a message back. She sent me photos of the litter, and to be honest, the pictures weren’t very flattering. The kittens looked pretty big and kind of evil, but I figured I should probably see them in person before I made a decision. So my roommate and I rented a car and drove up that weekend.

  We were welcomed into the house by a cat-lady stereotype of a person. She had messy, dirty-blond hair that was falling out of her ponytail from all sides, like she had put her hair in that ponytail weeks prior. The house was filled with big tiger cats running around and empty Chobani yogurt containers, which made everything smell of old dairy. She left us in the kitchen as she went to look for the available kitten that I would potentially be taking away from its mother, brothers, and sisters, but I knew if I were to take it I’d be doing it a favor by getting it away from this evil breeder (that I’m supporting) and her yogurt.

  After thirty minutes she came back into the kitchen. “I can’t find her anywhere!” As she was about to give up and send us home, she pulled out one of the chairs from under her kitchen table and on it lay a tiny, cheetah-patterned ball the size of my hand. It. Was. So. Small. It—she—was so small that she wasn’t even small; she was smoll. ’Cause smoll sounds even smaller than small.

  “She’s the runt of the litter. The other cats kind of beat up on her ’cause she’s so tiny, so I’ve been trying to find her a home, but no one wants her because of it.” No one wanted her because she was small?! I’d thought I would have to accept that any cat I got would get big! She was a miracle. “I need her.”

  I named her Link because I love Super Smash Bros. In no time at all, she became the most special thing in my life. I know how madly in love with her I am because I try to put my nose in her mouth, and I’m almost certain true love is when you enjoy smelling your significant other’s mouth. I’ll hold her so tight and whisper repeatedly, “I love you so much,” like I’m a stalker in a thriller as she tries to free herself from my grip. She’s too cute to even qualify as a cat; it’s almost easier to believe she’s a fake cat rather than a real cat, she’s so unnaturally perfect. She must be something else. Something magical that I manifested in a different dimension, where everyone is the most adorable, flawless version of themselves, including pets. Some 3-D anime universe, where cats’ fur is velvet and they all weirdly glow in the same way snow sparkles at daybreak. And I swear her coat smells exactly like Le Labo Santal 26; I don’t know how, but it does.

  Link is the dream best friend. She doesn’t do anything annoying. Except for some annoying cat things but cat things are so much less annoying than annoying human things. And we do everything together. When I read in bed, she sits on my shoulder like an owl and looks at the pages. When I watch television, she sits curled up on my lap and stares at the screen. When I write, she sits right beside my computer listening to my typing sounds. When I go to the bathroom she follows me in and walks around my legs in a figure eight until I’m done. We cuddle every night in all the same positions you would in a relationship, spooning, my arms and her paws wrapped around each other, the top of her head nuzzled under my chin like two puzzle pieces. I’m eternally thankful I ended up with a female cat, otherwise it would legitimately feel like she’s my boyfriend. I get nervous that if reincarnation exists, I could be cuddling a weird, demented rapist who is constantly thinking to himself, Boy, I got lucky coming back as a cat, this disguise is perfect! But even if she was the reincarnation of a normal, sweet girl, I still wouldn’t want to be spooning that girl . . . anyway, I really hope cats are just cats.

  What I didn’t take into account before I bought a cat was its life span, which I’ve learned can be up to twenty years. This means I’ll still have Link by the time I get married and probably for my first divorce. I never considered a twenty-year commitment, which is a long time for a narcissist but too short for someone with thanatophobia. Something I also didn’t take into account is that my cat would get sick from time to time. I’ve warned all my friends that if they ever start throwing up, even if their lives depend on me, I will cower and melt like the Wicked Witch. I’m not helpful in a crisis. Or a semi-crisis. Or a quarter-crisis. Which I proved abundantly the day Link ate an entire bag of almonds that I’d accidentally left on my night table.

  For twenty-four hours, Link was projectile-vomiting whole almonds. Yes, whole. Without even a bite mark on them. How did she survive? I don’t know. But I was absolutely terrified she wouldn’t. The first time she threw up the almonds, I was in the other room, and it sounded like a hailstorm. The almonds were flying out of her like bullets from an AK-47. My cat had transformed into an almond gun. It was dangerous for anyone in the vicinity. The experience left me with an almond phobia.

  From then on, every day I woke up terrified that my cat would be sick. I impressed upon anyone who entered my house that if they left any food lying around, Link would eat it and then throw it up, whole. I firmly believed she was capable of eating anything. I removed all flowers, plants, and anything that could be swallowed. I became delusional, imagining her digesting man-made objects. What if she choked? Would I have to learn small-cat CPR? I looked up the Heimlich maneuver for cats and just reading about it was traumatizing. It described pulling the tongue forward with your thumb and index finger and grabbing whatever was lodged with tweezers! The visual was destabilizing. I started picking up socks, securing toothpaste caps. Maybe she’d claw at my computer until one of the keys came out and I’d come home to find her dead, having choked on an S.

  This was when I realized that my cat would actually not take away any of my anxieties but instead usher in new ones, new anxieties that I would never have known existed if I hadn’t gotten her, saddling myself with responsibility and dread for half of my adult life. Apparently there are multiple diseases you can get from sharing space with a litter box. I saw an article about a dog who licked a woman’s scab and she had to get both of her legs amputated. The day before I saw that, I’d pl
ayed a game with Link where I pretended to be a dead body and let her chew on my skin; I’d tried my best not to flinch or blink to make it more realistic.

  I have anxiety that Link thinks she’s in an abusive relationship because I accidentally kicked her two different times because I hadn’t seen her there and once sat on top of her when I didn’t know she was under the covers. My cat is more scared than most cats, because she is the cat form of me. You should see us both jump when the air conditioner makes a noise. I wish I could just ask her if she’s okay; instead, I’m just left staring at eyes that are trying to tell me something and can’t. Are any animals okay? There’s no way to know.

  I’m afraid she’s going to find her way into the laundry machine, even though I check every nook and cranny of it before I turn it on. When it’s done, I’m still terrified I’ll open it to see leopard print added to the usual rainbow of colors. Same goes for the dishwasher. When I was still in school, I was so scared about Link being run through the dishwasher that I told my roommate I’d be on dish duty for the rest of the year if she took out the trash. She didn’t understand why we wouldn’t just switch off between dishes and trash like normal people. I didn’t want her to know that I was “I don’t trust that you won’t wash the cat with the dishes”–level anxious, so I stupidly told her I preferred dishes, which she pointed out she also preferred. So I just took out the trash and did the dishes so my cat wouldn’t die.

  Technically, there’s a world in which I could give Link to one of my ten friends who have asked to keep her and have my other fearful life back, but not without me drowning in a ten-foot pool of guilt. I have enough guilt leaving her alone for an hour during the day, which is good because I needed more reasons never to leave my house. But one night, I had a friend’s birthday dinner I couldn’t cancel on despite knowing I would spend the entire time thinking about how sad Link must be that I was gone. Everyone I tell this to when I’m trying to make an early exit always says the same thing: “She’s fine! She’s a cat. They’re meant to be alone.” To which I say, “We don’t know what they’re thinking! The nicest thing we can do for our pets is to always assume they’re not fine.”

  Anyways, while I was at my friend’s birthday, my sister and her friend Kyra (who are basically Tweedledee and Tweedledum when they are together) stopped by my dad’s to pick up sleepover supplies. By sleepover supplies, I mean they pack a BAG, like the same amount of stuff someone would pack for a weeklong getaway. And sometime between the two of them deciding which sheet masks they should do later and packing three extra pairs of underwear they wouldn’t need, my perfect little tiger runt escaped out the garage door they had accidentally left open, bolting like she was doing a prison break.

  When I arrived home at midnight and she didn’t run to the door to welcome me, I knew something was wrong. I hysterically searched the entire house, and as I went through room after empty room, the bad feeling in the pit of my stomach grew.

  I woke up my dad (basically a crime), panicking so hard I could barely form words. We searched the house again, and again, leaving no pillow unturned, then moved to the backyard. After we looked under every bush and up every tree, we scoured the street with our iPhone flashlights, jingling her toys like idiots and yelling her name, which she didn’t know.

  When four a.m. rolled around, it felt hopeless to continue and we decided to call it a night. My dad hated my cat because she ruined all of his furniture, but his face was so full of sorrow, it made me feel worse than I did already.

  “I feel so terrible for you, I feel so terrible,” he said solemnly. Making me cry harder.

  “I feel so terrible for you that I’m making you sad by being so sad, I’m so sorry,” I said through sobs.

  I slept less than an hour, leaving all of the doors and windows open, praying she’d find her way back and I’d miraculously wake up with her in my arms. I had never been able to feel safe sleeping in the house even with the doors and windows locked and the alarm on, so the prospect of sleeping with wide-open doors and windows was a tad disconcerting, but adjustments are required when one thing gives you more anxiety than another. So at least my priorities were in order.

  When I woke up, my nightmare was still reality. I was convinced Link had already been attacked by a pack of coyotes. I hadn’t protected her and there was almost no chance of getting her back. I was terrified to keep looking lest I see her perfect, tiny, spotted body run over by a car or being eaten alive by birds and rats. Thinking about her somewhere out there all alone made me sick. Sicker than I was when I saw her projectile-vomit almonds all over my room.

  Emotionally speaking, I imagine losing your cat feels like losing a child (except it’s not, because it’s a cat), but everyone else sees it like you losing an old grandmother who lived in Florida. No one really cares or feels that bad for you. I get it. It’s hard for people to sympathize with a death unless it’s a member of their nuclear family. Even when a friend of yours dies, people can’t help but think, How close were they really, though? It’s a degree of separation people’s empathy cannot expand to.

  When your pet is lost, there are very few things that you can actually do about it. Unfortunately, one thing you can do is make flyers. Why is making flyers embarrassing to me? Who knows. But luckily, my friend Rose came over and made them for me on my computer: LINK, 2 YEARS OLD/VERY SMALL/GREEN EYES/$$$ REWARD!

  I sat cross-legged on the floor as I watched her tiny face emerge from the printer over and over again, every fresh page another stab to the heart.

  Rose and I walked around the neighborhood and plastered the posters on every pole and car windshield. I was ashamed by how precious and rare Link looked in the flyer picture, because people would wonder how I could have lost such a mystical cat. It looked like one of the student wizards at Hogwarts had lost a pet; Link was a true Harry Potter animal, a tiny Hedwig / Mrs. Norris combo.

  After knocking on every door in the neighborhood, I concluded that there is nothing more humiliating than losing your cat; wandering the streets with a puffy face, shouting into space, looking under every shrub, and publicly pleading for help even though you know it’s useless, as does everyone who sees and talks to you.

  “I’ll keep an eye out.” “Good luck!” “Hope you find her!” my neighbors said with pitying expressions. I’d once thought that if I ever got the chance to be pitied like this, I’d like it, but now I realized that enjoying pity is only possible when you’re not actually in distress. She’s never going to find her, I imagined the neighbors saying once they shut the door.

  When the sun started to go down, Rose and I returned to the house and I sat in my backyard in the rain, wrapped in a blanket, crying, chain-smoking cigarettes (I’d quit four years earlier), and jingling the toy that she had zero chance of hearing and that I could barely hear myself over my teenage neighbors’ party.

  Rose eventually had to go home, so I texted every friend in my contacts with shaky hands, asking if any of them could sleep over. I couldn’t be alone. Unfortunately, it was hard to lure anyone over to sleep in my living room with all of the windows and doors open as I wept all night. No one said yes, probably because it’s “just a cat.” However, my friend Emily said she would stop by after dinner to check on me. She wouldn’t have been my first choice, if I’m being perfectly honest. Her naive, positive outlook on life had no chance of meshing well with my despair, but I was desperate for anyone, no matter how bubbly their personality.

  Emily entered my house to find my dad, my very guilty sister, and me staring at the Apple TV default montage of city landscapes, grim as ever. She took one look at my swollen face, put her hands on her hips, and declared, “We’re going to look one more time.”

  “It’s no use!” I said through tears. Then she told some story about her mom’s friend’s aunt’s hairstylist losing her dog and finding her a day later a block away, so I agreed to storm the streets with Emily one last time, but only so I could smoke more cigarettes. My sister came with us for moral su
pport.

  It was still raining and now dark. If Link was alive, she would be getting rained on right at that moment. She would be so scared. My poor angel! What had I done to her!

  Emily put her iPhone flashlight on and started calling out her name. I walked behind her, the bottom of my blanket dragging on the ground, crying because I knew it was futile.

  We were two houses down from mine when Emily declared, “I just heard a meow.”

  I wanted to push her. “You didn’t hear a meow. Why would you tell me you heard a meow?!”

  And then I heard the meow.

  “It’s probably a stray or someone’s outdoor cat that isn’t lost,” I said, not getting my hopes up.

  We slowly moved closer to the noise, which seemed to be coming from the bush next to my neighbors’ front gate.

  “I don’t want to look and be disappointed by some random outdoor cat,” I said.

  So Emily took the initiative and stuck her head in the bushes for a better look.

  “IT’S HER!”

  I grabbed her arm. Could it be??!! I dropped my blanket and cigarette onto the wet concrete and peered inside the bush. Link’s tiny, innocent face looked up at me. Meeeeooow.