Me and My Friend

Many people meet their best friend at school or even at a bar. However, that’s not how I met mine. Instead, I met mine one cat at a time because my son couldn’t stop finding them.

My life once belonged to me. It was quiet, mundane. We had 6 cats but nothing was required of me but to love on them. Since I was basically retired I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. Most people didn’t realize that I was sorely bored. I wanted to do volunteer work but my health kept me home.

I looked online and even tried engaging in a few places but being behind the screen didn’t fill the hole in my heart. There was no name for this missing part though.

That’s when my son came to me with an idea. He’d always been dreaming about owning a cat cafe but now he wanted to step out in faith.

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Then my son got an idea into his head. He wanted to get into animal rescue. Rescue takes a license, and a license means inspections, means strangers walking through your home unannounced, means paperwork we didn't want any part of. So instead of rescue, he just kept finding cats. One, and then another, and then it wasn't a hobby anymore, it was a sanctuary, and it had a name, and it had cats who'd been with us so long they weren't fosters anymore — they were bonded to us, the way old friends are.

I gravitate toward the ones nobody else wants — the chronically ill, the difficult, the senior cats nobody has patience for. I understand them because I am one of them, in a way. I live with my own chronic illness, and I know what it's like to sit in front of a doctor who won't slow down long enough to actually listen, who dismisses you instead of helping you. The cats and I speak the same language of being overlooked. So when I take in the ones who are hardest to place, I'm not just saving them. I'm being useful to a version of myself, too.

That's what the sanctuary gives me, if I'm honest — not just purpose, but company. A reason to get out of bed on the mornings my body doesn't want to cooperate. A place where I belong, that's actually mine. It doesn't fix the loneliness the way a person could, but it fills the space where the loneliness used to sit.

I won't pretend it hasn't cost me. It's cost me rest — there's always something that needs doing, even on the days I don't feel well enough to do it. It's cost money, because my son Adrian and I cover everything ourselves. It's cost us vacations, because a pet sitter is expensive and every spare dollar already has somewhere to go. And it's cost me the version of myself I keep meaning to become — a published magazine writer — because some days I don't even have twenty quiet minutes to sit down and write a sentence. More than once, I've thought, I love this, but I don't know if I can keep doing it. Lately it feels like two passions playing tug-of-war with my heart, and I feel guilty for even wanting something on the other side of the rope, because I know how many cats still need me, and how many more are still out there needing someone else like me.

Adrian carries the parts of this I can't — the manual labor, the errands, the cleaning, the shopping for eleven mouths and two more. For him, this sanctuary is the beginning of a dream he's just starting to reach for. For me, it's less about dreaming and more about showing up. I'm the support underneath his goal, even while it quietly becomes mine too.

If you want to know what this friendship actually looks like, up close, it's small things. It's the ache of knowing how many cats we want to help and simply can't. It's the memory of our very first $500 donation, the moment someone besides us believed this mattered enough to pay for it. It's also the worst night I've had in years — a kitten who got sick, and there was no one nearby who could help her in time, so we tried to figure it out ourselves, and we were too late. I still carry that one. I think I always will.

I haven't fully made peace with what this sanctuary has become in my life. It isn't a companion exactly, not the way a person is. It's more that it's stitched itself into me — into my days, my body, my son's future, my own sense of who I am. If it could sit across from me and talk, I'd tell it: you take up more of my life than anything else ever has, but I wouldn't be whole without you. And I think, if it could answer, it would tell me thank you — from every cat I've helped, even the ones who didn't make it, and that none of that was ever my fault. That I've always done what I could with what I had.

So here's the honest sentence, the one that isn't supposed to sound noble: I love my sanctuary, but sometimes I wish I had more time for me.

That's the truth underneath the gratitude. And it's also why I keep going — because somewhere five years from now, I picture a version of this that doesn't have to choose. A building of our own for the cats. A thrift store to help pay for it all, so the money isn't only ever going out. Enough breathing room that I finally sit down and become the writer I keep putting off becoming. Maybe even a trip back to Pittsburgh, just for a while, just because I want to.

People ask why a place — a sanctuary, of all things — became my best friend instead of a person. I think it's because the cats there know me. They're carrying the same kind of struggle I am, in their own bodies, in their own overlooked, dismissed, hard-to-place way. We found each other by accident, the way real friendships tend to happen, and somewhere along the way, taking care of them turned into them taking care of me too.