I hope that you know, you’ve always been the best cat you could ever be. I’m beyond lucky that I got to meet you and love you, even if for a bit. I know there’s a vacuum between us, you’re a little white cat, and I’m a desperate girl, on my knees, but some things don’t need to be said, they just are.
I’m hurting from things you can’t see, can’t understand, but you lick the tears from my face anyway. You always had so much love to give. I went to the shelter every single day for two weeks before I found you. I remember it like time pouring through clear resin. It was summer. It was an afternoon doused in golden sunlight and the trees full of green. I walked into the room and we made eye contact and I knew right there – that’s her – that’s my soulmate. Whoever said animals don’t have souls has never experienced the love of a little pet that thinks you’re everything in the world. You were on this cat tree, right at my eye-level. I picked you up and you put your face in my neck like you’d known me your whole life: take me, take me away from here, save me. It’s funny, we saved each other.
I took you home to my first apartment. There was no furniture, nowhere for you to hide, so you squeezed yourself into the crevice between the oven and the fridge. We were both just learning how to survive. You saw things, you didn’t know what was wrong with me, why I locked myself in the bathroom for hours, why I screamed at the darkness, but you slept in the bed with me, a soft lump of fur in the crook of my arm. You stood on the edge of the bathtub, watching my limp body floating in the bubbles, your glowing green eyes dark with concern. You licked my thighs and wondered why you tasted blood. You brought me your little stuffed toys, depositing them in my lap. You always knew when I was crying. I suspect you may have been a mama cat in the past.
You’ve been with me through the deepest pits of hell and back. You’ve been outside the bathroom door, listening to the pills clattering on the floor and wondering why I wouldn’t let you in, why I was letting myself burn into the earth. The paramedics frightened you. The red and blue, noises bleeding sharp in your sensitive ears. Boots too hard on carpeted floors. The empty bed. Empty for days, then weeks. The little dent on the sofa where we lay together. You’ve put your face against my slack one, you’ve sat on the sink while I’ve thrown up. You like sitting at the porch door and watching the bunnies play in the bushes, but when I leave home you move to my bedroom window that overlooks the parking lot, just waiting for me to come, for my figure to emerge from the car door. You yell at me through glass, through the holes of your carrier, through my wet hair hanging in my face, through the early morning haze of breakfast time gone, through the bloodburn of psychosis. Please, play with me, please get out of bed, I’m hungry, please, please,I miss you so.
I could live a thousand lifetimes and still never deserve you.
January, 2024
I’m frightened of you. I’m gonzo from the Adderall I’ve been stealing from my roommate and perpetually drunk from cinnamon whiskey. Things are bad. Worse than they’ve ever been. I lock you in the bathroom. I cuddle you in bed, staring right into those giant green eyes, with their flecks of gold, turning black with adoration as you purr. We’re laying on the floor, eye to eye and I dare you – stop hunting me, or else.
My love is lost in the demons that crowd everywhere, the screams of the damned, the shadows that are long and slick and laughing and wicked. I lock you out of the apartment as I pace around in the cold, granite light of the sunrise. My roommates are gone for the holidays and it’s just me and her – just like the very beginning. I just didn’t know the end would come so soon. You’re upset. Your litterbox is full from my neglect and you develop an eye infection so bad I have to drag my malnourished corpse down the five flights of stairs to the vet, and then back up again. I give you the eyedrops. I hide from the sunlight.
My heart aches for you. The apocalypse is coming and I don’t know what to do with you. The voices, the cult I’m stalking, the dangerous rides on the subway, the skulking in dark, cobbled alleys, the constant hammering away at my computer as I write out the secrets that are given to me, they lock me away from the world of the living. If I’m going to die, if I fail my mission – all these are scenarios that would leave you abandoned again, like you had been when I found out. And that’s unacceptable. You’ve been the best cat anybody could ever ask for. You’re clean to the point of anxiety; you have never once, not ever, scratched or slapped me. Even when I well deserved it. All you want to do is lick my face with your little sandpaper tongue and get tummy rubs and chase fireflies. I’m your whole world, but I can’t care for you any longer. I have to let go of everything.
And if I can’t have you, no one can.
Somewhere, in my horrible, psychotic, lizard brain, I recognize that you’re in danger. I’m on my knees, sobbing like I’ve never cried before. I can’t breathe, I can’t see, and there’s no way out. The apartment is so still and quiet, you’re just sitting there, eyes wide with fear. I’ve Googled it: how much Tylenol does it take to kill a cat? I’m sitting on my bedroom floor, the bottle in my hand, but for the first time the fistful of pills isn’t for me. The floor is cold and my chest is tight. Audrey, don’t make me do this, I beg, stop hunting me, please, for god’s sake, I love you, but you can’t come with me this time. I have to do this on my own. There’s so much I want to say to you, that I didn’t get to say, never will. How can you trust me with your little heart, when I can’t even trust myself with your life?
I’m not quite sure what happened next. There are big splotches of black in my memory like mold darkening the white of bread. All I know is there is today, and then there’s tomorrow. And tomorrow is without you, so I want to stay in today, cling on for dear life, weeping, repentant, damned. Sometime, Maya or Liesel get home and there are discussions, serious ones, my sister is called. She’s taken the train down from Boston. I try to tell them about the apocalypse coming, that I’m trying to save you from, but they don’t understand. But I know if you were here for one more day, it would happen, and there would be nothing I could do about it. So I go on the Internet and find this nice girl with a huge apartment to take Audrey. I go with her to move you in. You stare up at me from the window of your carrier, meowing, crying softly. I know how much you hate that carrier and the car ride. You’re afraid that it means I’m abandoning you. And no matter what I tell myself, no matter what version of the story happened, this time you’re right.
I wouldn’t just give you away to anybody. I made sure she has space for you to play and run and gallop and these huge windows for you to look out at Central Park. Her spare bedroom becomes your room – it’s even got a bathroom for your litterbox. It was the best thing I could do. When I come home, my bed feels so empty it’s like there are pieces of glass in my heart that bring sharp pains with every breath. My turn is over. But if I had nine lives, I would choose to love you in all of them.
I see you everywhere, Audrey. There are so many things I want to tell you, things we never got to say, never got to heal. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I don’t think I’ve ever loved another creature so deeply, so unselfishly. If anyone could have saved me, it would have been you. I wonder how it is I go on. How the sun rises on a desolate apartment, a broken heart, dreaming about the love that went beyond words, a bond forged between souls. I miss you every single day. I don’t think it’ll ever stop. It’s been two years, but I dream about you sleeping with me in the pale moonlight, phantom of the little, furry body pressed against mine. Sometimes you snore and it makes me laugh – how can such a tiny nose snore? And the night feels a little less lonely. And I go about my day, go to work and make dinner and play board games with my friends and take trips on planes but I know:
“Somewhere out there, if love can see us through
Then we’ll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true.”
Schizoposting 
