There’s a cat asleep at the foot of my bed, his wheezy snores barely perceptible above the whirr of the dishwasher and the nighttime chorus of coqui frogs.
I was a self-professed cat despiser for most of my adult life. I thought they were jerks, what with their seeming disregard for others and their emotional aloofness (plus they made me sneeze). But when we moved to Hawaii, we got two feral “working” cats to keep the rat population down (this is the jungle, and there’s a perfect order to things that seems obvious once you pay attention to it).
And then one day a kitten showed up out of nowhere like St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince touched down from space and, well, you can’t turn away a jungle kitty (or a little prince, for that matter).
It wasn’t long before my “No cats in the house!” rule turned into an “OK, maybe just in the living room...” exception, and then altogether dissipated into a special blanket and a permanent place at the foot of the bed. Now, I run to the rescue when he cries and dry him off from the rain like it’s bath time.
His meows are the same pitch and tone as a baby’s cries (“wah, wah, wah”). He looks me dead in the eye and howls from the depths of his... stomach, likely... as if to say, "Help me, please! I am suffering. My survival depends on you!" (I know he's only half telling the truth.)
Sometimes, it even sounds like he’s calling “Mom, mom, mom!” and it works, every time: to wake me from a sound sleep in the middle of the night, to wrest me from the cocoon of a warm bed on chilly mornings, to pull me away from any activity that isn’t nearly as important as answering that call. My heart can’t take it and I’m convinced he knows this, though he feigns innocence when I unlatch the door and extend my arm to open it wide to him.
He came in tonight after scratching at the screen door, soaked. Usually, he meows outside of it until I let him in. Tonight though, the heavy wooden door was closed, which is not the norm, and he was unable to see inside. He must have panicked, fearing that his typical approach couldn’t penetrate the double layer. I heard the commotion of some scratching and meowing and what I can only imagine was him desperately throwing the full weight of his small frame against the door’s.
As soon as I opened it, he darted between my legs into the safety of the dry house, his fur parted with saturation. I grabbed the towel I keep next to the front door for such occasions, knelt down beside him, and wiped in long strokes down his tube-sock body like a big mama cat tongue.
He began purring on contact.
Earlier today, he lay nestled in my arms like a napping newborn, his head nuzzled into my chest with closed eyes, purring double time. And now he’s here, keeping me company (though that’s probably not how he sees it) as I type.
The Rudyard Kipling fable, The Cat That Walked By Himself, explains how man (or, woman) domesticated wild animals — all but the cat, who is far too self-possessed to subordinate himself to anyone. In the tale, a woman manages to seduce other animals with the promise of basics like food, warmth, safety, and shelter. When the cat comes by to surveil the scene, the woman says she has no use for him and shoos him away. Eventually, the cat disproves this when he comforts her crying baby by rubbing up against it and entertaining it by playing with a piece of string. The mother notices and he wins her over, simply by being his little cat self.
I sympathize with the woman in the fable. I have stern orders from my more practical side not to give in to such a display, and not to reward this type of manipulative behavior. I even used to chase him across the yard when he was a kitten and had a habit of pooping in all the places we tended to walk. But on the days when his eye goop looks like tears, I can't resist.
I didn’t set out to domesticate him, but he worked his way into my home and sparked a re-wilding, a reseeding of a truth deep within, something true to my nature. Yes, he scratches me sometimes and his incessant whining can be annoying (especially when it disrupts my sleep), and often I wake up with congestion when he sleeps in the bed… but, there’s no going back. The boundaries between outside and in have merged as my icy heart has thawed.
When he lets me, I pick him up and tell him I love him and he closes his eyes and stretches out his neck for me to scratch. He rests his little head in my upturned palm as I oblige and we both know: Just because you can walk by yourself, doesn’t mean you have to.
But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.
~ The Little Prince
Credits
Dedications: Solitude (For Yehudi Menuhin) by Nigel Kennedy, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra & The Stella.
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Feral