the cat and i had a relationship. we would have these fights. she would try to bite me, or actually she would really bite me, and i would put two fingers–pointer and middle–into her throat (gently) and keep her from biting me more. she would stand up on her two back legs and try and get around my fingers, the tips pressing into her jugular. she would try and go around them, bite them, scratch them. she would go on her back and kick at my wrists with the claws on her back paws.
it was a thing we did.
we had to spay her at a fairly old age. her previous owner, my roommates’s Venezuelan girlfriend, didn’t do it. so every three weeks Prana (that’s the cat’s name, Prana, which is Hindi for “breath”) would piss on everything and roll around on the ground and beg to be fucked. she was in pain, you could tell. she’s a house cat and never leaves the house. the only contact she gets with other cats is the image of a Siamese cat that hangs out on the windowsill of an apartment next door. so we brought her to a vet in our neighborhood and got her spayed. when she came back she was drugged and slightly more violent. but at least she wasn’t horny and our apartment smelled better.
but i always felt a little guilty for condoning the removal of her genitalia. she and i had a relationship. there the fights, but there was also a time when i felt particularly lonely and physically sick for three months straight when i would come home and sit on the couch and ponder my loneliness and she would climb onto my chest and look straight at me. we did this every day for three months. we got along. then we got her fixed. they opened her up and removed the parts of her that allow her to procreate, to fulfill one of maybe three essential biological functions (without ever having had sex). i know this is anthropomorphizing. i don’t know what it’s like to be a female cat that never had sex and then developed a nice relationship with a human male and then the human male (along with two other familiar humans) brought me to a place where other strange humans cut me open and took my reproductive organs. but still.
in any case a nice couple that’s just about to get married met the cat last night at our going away party. we’re all leaving the country in the next few weeks and we’ve been looking for someone to take Prana. this couple liked her. they played with her for half an hour at our party. today they came and took her.
we tried to get Prana to go into the cage that would amputate her from her life in our apartment, but she resisted, scratching us and hissing. she’s usually a quiet cat. my other roommates couldn’t get her into the cage and she ran away from the living and went into the only other open door: my room. i followed her and sat on the floor. i pressed my two fingers against her throat like old times and she put her paws on my hands, but not violently, softly, like a hug, and we sat like that for a moment. i picked her up and scratched her throat and chest. i stood up and brought her out to the living room. she resisted again, scratched me in the face, hissed, but we got her in. we locked the cage. her new owners put a large towel over the front. Prana reached out her paw between the bars of the cage, slipping her claws into the plastic and ripping it in a last attempt to regain normalcy and resist being taken away to some new place she’s never seen. which is understandable.
when they took her and all her stuff i had the following feeling: things are changing and i’m sad and i miss her.
david (isaac) backer 