He was sitting on the windowsill the day Prince died. Sunlight cutting across the hardwood, his face tilted toward the television like he understood what was being said, or at least liked the tone of it. When the announcer said overdose, he flinched just slightly. Like even he could tell this was a big one.
He didn’t move for hours after that. Just stayed there, paws tucked under him, eyes half-lidded like he was in mourning. Or bored. With him, it’s hard to tell the difference.
That was nine years ago. His name is Mookie. He’s a cat. A mostly-white ragdoll with a grey face and blue eyes so sharp it sometimes feels like he’s seen something he shouldn’t have and has chosen, with great dignity, not to speak of it. His meow is loud. Not in a cute way. Sharp and declarative, like a drunk yelling outside a bar.
He turned twenty last week.
He’s scraggly now, eight pounds if that. A few teeth left. He moves his hips over my floors like he’s navigating invisible tripwires. But when he stretches out in the sunlight or sits just so on the couch, you can still see traces of the animal he once was. Not just young, but lush. Regal, even. I have this one picture of him from around 2007, maybe 2008, he’s lying across the front lawn of our old house, stretched out like a Roman aristocrat at a bathhouse. There’s something almost erotic about the confidence of it. A little obscene. That’s how I remember him. Not the kitten he must have been when we got him, not the bony gremlin he is now, but that moment: fur glowing in the summer light, tail lazily curled like he owned the property outright. The posture of someone who knows, without a doubt, that the world belongs to him.
He arrived in our lives in 2005. I was thirteen. It was the summer before I started at an all-boys Catholic high school, which sounds like the setup to a joke and, in many ways, was. The world felt unknowable then. I had acne and backne and a closet that was starting to feel claustrophobic in ways I didn’t have language for. And into that hormonal murk came Mookie. Just a little blur of fur and noise who didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t play the role of comfort animal, not at first. He wasn’t that kind of cat. But he was there. He watched.
Over the next twenty years, Mookie became one of the longest running relationships of my life. He’s met everyone: every girl I’ve dated, every guy I wasn’t dating, every friend who crashed on my couch for a weekend. He sniffed their bags, their shoes, their socks. He knew their scents before I did. One of my exes – now married in Colorado – still asks about him. She hasn’t seen him since we were twenty-two. That’s his impact. He’s like an old college professor you still quote even if you don’t remember what the class was about.
I sometimes wonder how he’s processed the last two decades.
Does he remember Obama being elected? Was he sitting by the television that day, watching the news with the same squinting skepticism he gives pigeons through the window? He’s been in the room during fights and funerals, sex and silence, nights when I couldn’t sleep and mornings I didn’t want to wake up. He’s walked over laptops and notebooks and people that now hold parts of my life I’ve completely forgotten. He’s outlived three presidents, three mayors, and most of my friendships.
He was there when I moved out from my parent’s house for the first time. When I came back. When I left again. He was there through long winters where I barely got out of bed, and strange summers where my family’s house was always full of people, music, half-drunk bottles of vodka (now mixed with water to trick our parents), and some new person I’d met on an app who swore they “didn’t usually do this.” Mookie didn’t judge. But he did pick sides.
He was there during the days I didn’t leave my apartment. When everything felt too loud. When I couldn’t figure out if I was grieving or just stunned.
Grief makes time feel like wet paper, thin and collapsing. You think you’re fine and then you put on something they bought for you, or find a note of groceries they wrote on the back of a receipt. Mookie curls up at the end of my bed like a strange sentry. At one point I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and panicked, and he was just staring at me. No blinking. It should’ve been creepy, but it wasn’t. It felt like surveillance with love, like he was making sure I didn’t vanish.
He sits next to me on the couch and blinks, slow and deliberate, like a metronome trying to calm me down. He comes and sits directly on my chest, his paws weighing down impossibly heavy for such a small creature.
Mookie is how I date things. A measuring tape for memory. Oh right, that was the year he lived with my brother in Long Island City. That was before he lost his teeth. That was when he jumped on the counter and knocked over the mixer. He’s a clock. A little ghost-clock who paces my apartment and screams at 6 a.m. and has been silently watching me become whoever I am now. My witness to everything I thought I was cleverly hiding.
He’s twenty. I’m thirty-three. I don’t remember who I was before him.
I still talk to him every day. I complain about work; I ask him if I’m making the right choices. Sometimes he answers with a meow, other times he just looks at me in a sort of quiet, solemn, vaguely disappointed way. Both, I’ve found, are effective forms of communication.
The screaming has never stopped and age has only made him louder. Sometimes he doesn’t want food or water. He just wants you to know he’s alive. There’s something both beautiful and infuriating about that. Like he’s resisting mortality one cry at a time. I used to try to quiet him with treats or affection or scolding. Now I just say, “I hear you, man,” and let him go off.
I’ve always liked the idea of a familiar — a witch’s animal companion, not just a pet but a bonded spirit. It makes sense when you think about how a cat imprints on you, not with loyalty in the dog sense, but with a kind of mysticism. There’s something eerie and ancient about the way they just appear when you need them, and disappear when you don’t. But they’re just animals, aren’t they? I’ve heard that a cat would eat your face if you died in your apartment. I hope he wouldn’t. But also… sure, buddy. You can eat my face. That’s okay. We’ve shared everything else.
It’s easy not to take pets too seriously. People sometimes talk about them like accessories. But twenty years is a long time to know somebody. I was talking to my downstairs neighbor the other day, they just got a new kitten. They’re in their 50s, and they said, kind of offhandedly, that this would probably be their last new pet. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. The math of it. The silent terms we sign when we bring a new animal home. You will watch me grow older, and I will watch you disappear.
We like to think of their lives as small. Tucked into apartments, sleeping half the day, looping through the same three windowsills. But are our lives so much bigger? We chase meaning and legacy, burn ourselves out trying to leave a mark, and still wonder if any of it matters. What’s the true measure of a life? Is it the number of people who know your name, or the few who feel safe enough to fall asleep beside you? I think the world would be better if more of us lived like cats. Found joy in sun patches. Called out to those who cared for us when we needed something. Rested without guilt. Stayed close to the people we love, and forgave them when they were late with dinner.
Cynical people like to say your pet doesn’t love you; that they just love the sound of the can opening. Pets are just domesticated opportunists, evolutionary grifters who learned how to scam affection for calories. What a miserable way to look at life! I’ll take a different view. I think love is mostly repetition anyway. Who sits beside you when you have nothing left to give? Who climbs onto your chest in the most inconvenient and annoying position, just so you know they’re there? The universe gave us wonderful, terrible, reasoning brains so we could come up with all kinds of nonsense to try and enjoy the hell around us.
Sometimes I think about what the last thing he sees will be. Will it be me? Will I be lucky enough to be there, to close his eyes and thank him? Or will I find him one day, curled somewhere small and warm, already gone? I hope it’s peaceful. I hope he dreams of the front lawn in the summer. I hope he remembers who he was.
On a Cat, Ageing
Sir Alexander Gray
He blinks upon the hearth-rug,
And yawns in deep content,
Accepting all the comforts
That Providence has sent.
Louder he purrs and louder,
In one glad hymn of praise
For all the night’s adventures,
For quiet restful days.
Life will go on forever,
With all that cat can wish;
Warmth and the glad procession
Of fish and milk and fish.
Only – the thought disturbs him –
He’s noticed once or twice,
The times are somehow breeding
A nimbler race of mice.
oh god.. this one got me good.
« He’s twenty. I’m thirty-three. I don’t remember who I was before him. » this one hit me like a ton of bricks. thank you lolo, for putting words onto my grief and making it make sense even two years after my girl’s passing