I was adopted by a cat....

So I was adopted by a cat.

It was the winter of 2019...a simpler time before the chaos of 2020 and my dad spotted a small gray cat in our backyard. He said that she was as feral as could be, a stray that was only a few months old. Six or seven months at best.

He went to the kitchen and cut off a piece of steak that he had cooked the night before and tossed it out the backdoor. She ran up to it, took it in her mouth and ran away to go eat it somewhere. She continued to come back for the next few weeks as winter was coming on and it was getting colder.

One of the boards on our back porch was broken and created a small opening for animals to crawl through and peek into our house. The small cat ended up living under our porch at some point, when exactly my dad nor I are sure of. But, whenever one of us would wake up in the middle of the night and head to the kitchen we would turn on a small light to see, so we didn't run into the chairs, she would pop her small head up through the small hole in the porch and look at us, watching me or my dad carry the food or our drink to the dinning room table. She would watch us for a bit as the dinning table was right beside the siding glass door which lead to the porch.

My dad had placed a small bowl out of the porch for her and in the morning I would fill it up for her. In the beginning she would hide under the porch when we fed her. Scared we might hurt her or something. Then she would run to the other end of the porch as we filled up her bowl every morning and night.

Eventually she stopped running away from us. She even brushed up against us at times when we fed her, and she would wait at her food bowl.

At this point in time, neither my dad or I were able to get close enough to figure out her sex. If we got too close for her comfort without her initiating it, she would hiss and sometimes run. My dad figured that she was a girl due to how small and feminine her features were. But I had already taken to calling her Gray because that was the primary colour of her fur with small bits of oranges scattered throughout.

There were times when she would stare into the house, as if she was thinking about coming but was too scared, too unsure. Then, one morning, as I went out to feed her I left the door open a crack so I could slip back in easily without having to juggle the container that held the food and fight with our broken doorknob. Gray slipped in-between my feet as I bent down to pour the food into her bowl and went inside the house. She sat at the entrance, on the linoleum by our dining table and looked around for a second before turning around and heading back out to eat her food.

Soon after that my dad made a small house out of a storage box for her to sleep in during the winter as it was getting colder outside. But it turned out that she didn't really need it.

Gray would sit in front of the door looking into the house until we let her in. Before I did this I would have to put up my other cat Chloe so they would not fight as me and my dad dreaded. So while Gray would be inside of the house, I would put Chloe in our guest bedroom for a few hours before letting Gray go back outside.

Gray ended up becoming super comfortable in our house, that at one point she disappeared and neither my dad or I knew where she went. I went into my bedroom, thinking that maybe she was exploring a little further into the house than just the living room and kitchen. Gray had curled up into a little ball on my bed, snuggled down into the blankets with the light off.

I called my dad to tell him that I had found her. He comes into my room, looks around for a second, spots her and then sighed and just shook his head.

He said that she was "getting too comfortable" in the house and we weren't sure that we really wanted another cat, didn't want to deal with them fighting. It was getting harder to put her back outside, she didn't want to back out into the cold and I didn't really want to have to put her back out there. She would run away because she knew that we were going to try, so we let her stay in our guest room at night and moved her food bowl and water in there also. She slept in the guest room during the night, and Chloe slept in the living room. My dad and I would switch them out every few hours so one was not trapped in a room all day.

When they eventually did meet there was a cat fight and it lasted for a while.

Gray began following me around. I would get up from the couch to go to the kitchen and she would follow behind me. When I would head from my bedroom to the bathroom she would wait outside the door for me. Even as I am writing this, she is beside me on the couch asleep.

My dad said that she "chose" me. That I was the person that she chose to be with, and if I always treated her with kindness and loved her as I do, she would be with me for the rest of her life. I tell people that she adopted me. Like if I was to go to the animal shelter to adopt an animals or look through Petsmart and peek through the glass at the kittens, she went house to house possibly and peeked into our glass doors, saw me and thought "that is my human".

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—liv atterson

Liv Atterson is an Indiana based writer, where is currently finishing a General Studies Degree and plans to continue to get her Bachelor’s in English and Art History. She is an avid believer that you can never own too many books just too few shelves. When she is not reading or writing she can be found studying and drinking her body weight in coffee. She is currently working on her debut book.

For more content, follow her on Instagram @livdrinkstea, and view her blog.