I have loved many animals in my life, and because of that, I have also lost many. That is the bargain, I suppose. Love asks for everything, and in the end it keeps the memory.
In 2004, a friend’s younger sister found a litter of stray kittens. She brought one home, but she was only nine or ten, and her family did not want to keep her. The kitten was five or six weeks old, skinny and dirty, with the wary look of something that had already learned the world was not always kind. I took her home and named her Callie.
She was afraid of everyone at first. Afraid of hands, of footsteps, of ordinary household sounds. Trust did not come all at once. It arrived in fragments. A little less flinching. A little more curiosity. A willingness, finally, to stay in the room with us instead of disappearing from it.
When I think of her now, twenty-two years later, I do not think first of the ending. I think of the way she used to sit on the bed and stare at the ceiling fan, her head moving with each slow rotation, as if she were trying to solve it. One day she leapt for it without warning, throwing her whole tiny body at a mystery she had apparently decided could be caught. She did something similar with my betta fish after watching him circle his bowl for days. She reached in once, decisively, and that was that.
She was that kind of cat. Quiet, watchful, underestimated.
Because she had once been hungry, food mattered to her in a way it did not to other animals. She hoarded it. She ate as if the next meal might not come. For a while she gained too much weight, and I had to cut her food back. When she began losing weight, I thought the problem was solving itself. Then she kept losing, and fast. The vet believed she had hemolytic anemia. We tried treatment, but within a week she was worse. By the time we brought her back, her liver was failing, and there was nothing left to do but spare her more suffering.
Callie was only eighteen months old.
She was the first great heartbreak of my adult life, which may be why she remains so clear to me. Not blurred by time, but sharpened by it. I can still see her sweet eyes. I can still picture her studying the ceiling fan with complete seriousness, convinced there was something there worth understanding.
Her life was short. That is the fact that hurts. But there is another fact beside it, and I hold on to that one too. For the time she was here, she was safe. She was loved. She was home.
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