My Heart, My Prince, My Boy

My story of cats begins with a dog. Specifically an American Eskimo named Frosty (not my choice) who'd had a hard life. She'd been adopted by my aunt originally, but due to allergies she'd ended up with my grandmother who kept her outside for most of her life. I'd spent a lot of time with her whenever we visited. When my grandmother died and Frosty had refused to stay with the people my aunt set up to care for her I insisted that she be mine instead.

She never took to my attempts to make her an inside dog (my mom never took to the mess she made during it either) so she ended up being inside on nights, especially as she got older. This night I knew something was wrong. She couldn't keep down food or water. I knew when I took her to the vet in the morning she would die. I cried myself to sleep and had a strange dream.

Instead of dreaming about death or dogs, I dreamt that my father was taking me from one shelter to another looking for the perfect cat. We kept looking at black ones, but something would always be wrong with them, they'd be too young, or they'd have blue eyes. I woke up especially bewildered as my father hated cats. I had tried to bring kittens home for years and always gotten the answer no. Any other animal: turtles, ferrets, dogs, sugar gliders, fish, frogs, lizards- they all come and lived their lives happily, but cats did something that he couldn't stand.

He and I went together to say goodbye to Frosty, who had pancreatic cancer (a bit of a double-tipped arrow, my maternal grandfather had recently died of the same thing) and I spent weeks trying to forget the dream.

I failed, of course. When I wasn't working I was looking at cats online. The dream felt like it had been a message to me, Frosty's goodbye. After discussing it with a friend I nervously brought it up with my parents.

"I don't expect you to say yes, in fact I completely expect you to say no..." I told them of the dream and that there were several cats that I was interested in. "It could be a Graduation present or an early birthday present, or both. You know, I'm not needy. I was thinking we could go in a couple of weeks."

"Why wait?" my father asked.

"Huh?" I was startled and shaking.

"I mean, if you have some you already like, why wait, why not go now?"

My brain was broken. Was this happening? I'd been trying for my entire life to have a cat. Was this being allowed?

We went to the humane shelter where most of the cats were in tiny cages at that time. I went to see the cats I'd looked at online. One wasn't interested, one was violently disinterested (I didn't get the hint and got a scratch, my mom got a bit huffy), his neighbor was asleep. I felt at a loss. The trip wasn't going how I thought it would go.

"Well, lets look around at the other cats too," my dad said.

I nodded and started looking into tiny cages. I was looking at another cat when he tried to reach out and grab me. I ran over to him so fast my mom had to remind me to sanitize my hands first.

I pulled him out of his cage and he put his paws on the side of my face and gave me a human kiss. Kitty lips to human lips. From there he purred a storm and nuzzled my face striving evermore to get closer to me.

"I think you found your cat," Mom chuckled.

"I guess so," I muttered, being loved to death. "Now what do I do?"

"You put him back and go fill out the forms."

With a sigh I put the then four month old kitten back in the steel bar locking cage and went to line up at the desk to fill out forms to adopt him... only to have my parents come out with him a few minutes later.

"He broke out," my dad explained.

"Another Houdini?" many of my pets over the years had known how to operate cages.

"I guess he really wants to be with you," my mom said.

And he was. I named him Kokoro, the Japanese for "heart" because of the idea that when you choose to love and care for something, you're letting your heart walk on without you, outside your body.

I started to get sick and Koko started to act out... I knew there was one way to solve this problem, but I had no idea if my parents would ever go for it: Koko needed a sibling. Whereas Koko was a spry cat who could jump six feet in the air without trying, loved getting on counters and tables, I needed a specific kind of cat that like floors more. I needed a Birman. Somehow, I got permission and narrowed my search to "the last Birman in Utah," at the time named after some Russian Vodka for his seal coloring, I met him and he sat up politely and gave a whispered "mew."

I mistook his politeness for disinterest at first. At the shelter he didn't seem to care much, but the second we left the shelter that changed.

The cat who had been shifted to three different shelters because no one had wanted him sobbed the whole way home on my hands. At home, he got his last name: Prince, fitting for such an elegant cat.

For roughly a decade the two watched over me while I was married, divorced, struggling through disability, and even as I started to find new love.

Koko suddenly became very ill. His entire system was full of sand and stones and they were already on food to prevent that. What we could do was so invasive and painful I couldn't think to put him through it, even though I'll always be haunted by what ifs. I let my soul mate go.

A month passed and I was crazy. I couldn't sleep. Koko had slept on my chest at night and controlled my heart rate. His purr had helped my body heal. Prince, in all his adorableness, had basically no purr and somehow controlled my digestion (seriously, how did my body work before it had cats?)

In a panicked state I emailed all of the shelters begging for their strong purrers. They were offered up to me on silver kitty beds. I hopped from shelter to shelter with my partner. At one I met Duncan.

He seemed really chill. He didn't get up and move like the other cats did and, when I picked him up, he did purr, loud. But he was kind of nippy and I knew that indicated that he could have some social issues better dealt with with more cats than I had and specifically a cat way younger than I had. I tried to find a better cat that fit the bill and was closer to Prince's advanced age, but on the day I'd given myself an ultimatum, I picked him up and almost passed out from hearing his purr. I was calmed.

I adopted him.

There's something you should know about cat purrs: they do it because they're happy, to create bonds, or because they need to calm themselves. Duncan, who was renamed Neji has kitty OCD. It's a real thing. It took two years to get him to understand that petting was a good thing. He's a lot better now, mentally. We tried drugging him for a while but it didn't work great (it just helped him not want to scream every time someone dropped something) and he was too smart to take it. We're thinking of teaching him English.

For a while he had a cold, so we would take him with us anytime we bathed or showered for the humidity, so bathrooms are his favorite room.

I had been looking for a cat like Koko. What I got was a cat son who challenges me more than the other two have. I can see him thinking.

After a couple of months, I just got used to sleeping without a cat on my chest. Adaptation. Amazing.