The Chosen
How do people live without a cat?
No, really, it’s a serious question. Who licks the butter knife? Surely people don’t just . . . wash them. And who fucks up the curly ribbon at Christmas? Nobody gets to sit down and wrap Christmas presents without it turning into a game/battle with the cat, do they? I ask because I have recently endured almost a year of forced catlessness, the first since I was a young’un, and discovered I hardly knew how to live. This year, when I was talking to myself I was really talking to myself and had some concern for my sanity. For the rest of my life I was able to delude myself I was talking to the cat.
I’ve rarely been catless because I was the chosen one. Cats have, in the past, magically shown up in my life. They seem to know I’m a sucker for them. Strays would follow me home from school when I was a kid. That Weasel cat straggled into my life the day, the very hour my year of homelessness ended—another catless year because you can’t have cats living in a Honda subcompact in Colorado in the winter. Weezy sauntered into the dingy little cabin in Frisco I’d finally managed to rent as I carried in my first load, jumped up on the counter, and started complaining for something to eat. She was just a kitten, skinny and sick. She hunkered down politely and listened to my whole long tale of woe about I’m not ready for a cat and I just had to find homes for my dear ones last year when I lost my place and my heart is still broken about it and I don’t have money for a cat anyhow . . . and started bitching for supper again. Chosen, I dutifully went to the store for cat-food. While Merlin was dying, our vet introduced me to Z, who let me cry a river into her fur when I finally lost my sweet, badass tomcat. I was never a crazy cat lady living with dozens of them, but a cat has consistently shown up to plug the gaping hole left in my life when I lost my cat.
Until 2022, that is. I managed to keep my cherished Luna comfortable until the spring equinox with extraordinary measures, but I should have let her go in January. She was the love of my life and I just couldn’t do it. So she lived for three months on drugs for everything—drugs to make her eat, drugs to keep her pain free, drugs to make her poop, and pick lines to keep her hydrated. Eventually I had to let go though and, as I had not been chosen by another, I had to live with that awful, empty, aching hole. Nobody could ever replace Luna. Nobody could replace any of them, but this time, not having a cat to share my grief with poisoned me. I have lived with periods of depression all my life, but this was a deep, dark, long-lasting pall like none other. Admittedly there were exacerbating influences, but I can get through a lot if I have a cat to share it with.
I had to go searching for a cat. Being chosen is easy. Choosing is not.
I told my friends I was looking in case any strays showed up in their lives. I advertised for a cat in witchy ways. Praying for an introduction at the new moon, putting tincture of catnip in my homemade mosquito repellent, and lighting candles in front of a mirror and a whisker at the full moon (the whisker was a volunteer of Luna’s—if you didn’t know, cats shed these sensory organs, which I find remarkable). When that failed I contacted local rescue organizations, but since I was doing the choosing I had a list of non-negotiables: had to be female, not feral, not traumatized, had to be accustomed to dogs, and could not have any significant medical issues at the outset. Luna’s chronic stuff had about bankrupted me and certainly, I told them, if something medical came up, I’d find the money for it, but I couldn’t afford it going in. It took months of heartbreaking failures and near misses, but Whisper finally fit the bill, and I chose her and brought her home.
Presumably because she didn’t get to choose, Whisper is not that into me. She hid under the bed for almost a month and, also uninterested in food, is immune to bribery with treats. Months later, our relationship is finally developing, glacial bit by glacial bit, but I’m spoiled. I have never had to work this hard for it before. It has been exhausting. When I have been the chosen one, all I had to do was show my new cat friend the food and the litter box and they curled up in my armpit and claimed me for their own and we remained joined at the hip and the heart until they died and left me bereft.
Cats are customary familiars of witches. They are mystics who can see many other levels of existence than those apparent to humans. Cats are utterly ambivalent, at once fully engaged and completely aloof. This is the source of their power as helpmeets, because spellcraft for the benefit of humans is often, at its most basic, an exercise in changing consciousness, illuminating the ambivalent bipole in a meaningful way to empower free travel along it.
Cats demand life on their own terms and I, the happily enslaved, have always been willing to grant them those terms. All of my other cat friends have been willing to trade intimacy for intimacy plus my slavish devotion, which I give gladly. Whisper is not that way. Because her terms are so very different and new to me, she’s also put me in the way of considering other fraught relationships.
~ ~ ~
I have always been the chosen one by my human lovers, too, and having been chosen, I curled up in their armpits and offered them the same sort of slavish devotion I do to my cats. But in human relationships that’s called codependency and it leads to unhealthy imbalance and ultimately an unhappy ending. I know this because I am insane and have done it multiple times with the same result. Now that I am a grateful postmenopausal geezer with less than zero interest in lovers, all I want is honest, ambivalent intimacy with a cat. Armpit time. Lap time. I don’t know if I’m going to get it. That is a privilege of the chosen.
Ironically, I think this particularly hard-to-get mystic I live with now is teaching me a lesson my easy-to-get human lovers never could. Married friends I have admired for their steadfastness have told me, in response to my baffled appreciation that “you have to work at it.”
I think I get it now that the work they were talking about is negotiation, compromise, whining, groveling, and manipulation. Bribery if it works. She demands much, this new chosen one of mine. My sacred morning reading time has been appropriated by catfishing and zoomies because, as long as I’m an interactive cat toy, I am at least on her radar. I have started getting some purring and chirping so I can slide back into my delusion about talking to myself. She grooms my hair sometimes in the night. Slobbers all over my head, which makes for some spectacularly punk-spikey morning hairdos. There’s a little bit of an ewwww factor because, slobber, but it is, at least, a genuine gesture of intimacy and affection. I am not the chosen one, I take what I can get.
My chosen one: writing coach and relationship guru.
Photo by author
Attribution:some images by: https://freepngimg.com/
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press where words and images matter.