crackbaby & tender hearts

I can see my cat’s teeny pink boy nipples.

I have the most annoying cat in the world. He drags broccoli from the garbage to gnaw on in the living room, like a dog with a bone. He follows me from room to room to room, like a dog with an anxiety disorder. He buries my food, while I’m eating it, steals my popcorn, leaving popcorn crumbs all over. He never thinks poop is quite buried enough yet, given an opportunity he will poop in the bathtub, leaving it totally exposed. He thinks nothing of walking through my dinner plate, stepping into my cup of tea, sprawling across my laptop, pining at least one of my hands to the table. He compulsively rushes into every closet any time I open the door. Every closet. Every time. Left to his own devices, he will climb up my clothes, knocking them off the hangers, scrabble up to the shelves & push everything off. He wanders on the tops of my kitchen cabinets, leaving tell-tale greasy little paw prints on the hood of the stove. He has stolen my underwear & twelve dollars cash money. Given a choice, he will sleep on my face.

I am allergic to cats.

I have the most affectionate cat in the world. He just wants to be with me. He wants to poop where I poop. We share everything, food, time & space. He doesn’t believe the theorem that two objects cannot occupy the same space. He is wedged between me & my dinner plate or my laptop. He’s a frequent, albeit illiterate, contributor to my emails, FB status, blog posts & homework assignments. He challenges me to figure out just what it was he changed in my settings when I wasn’t watching him. He’s fast & funny & tolerant. I hang him upside down, play him like a set of bongos, make him dance, follow him with my camera. I sing to him in the key of off and he curls up under my chin. After two months he returned the twelve dollars, leaving first the ten folded on my pillow, then the two singles a few weeks later. He tears silk flowers from my arrangements & leaves them under my covers, I fall asleep with him in my arms, wake with him staring at me from the next pillow. The alarm goes off, I sit up, and he crawls into my lap, flips over on his back, exposing his belly for a rub & purring to beat the band. Call me, you can hear him purring over the phone as he tries to push it out of my hand with his nose.

Today we went to the vet, to have a very stinky, very rotten tooth taken care of, discovered a heart murmur & with it, a higher risk of dying under anesthesia. How could he be ill? Living with CrackBaby is like living with a hyperactive 8-year-old boy in a fur suit. He swings from the chandeliers, bounces off the walls, he annoys the neighbors until they’re forced to call building management, but really, how do you stop a happy cat from running & dancing in the night?

I left him for tests and went home. Alone. I got a lot of work done today. I was able to use both hands to type. I had full use of my kitchen table, walked through my home without fear of tripping on four legs and fur.

Six hours of awfully awfully quiet.

$566 dollars, two syringes full of blood, one echocardiogram & a diagnosis of a leaky mitrovalve later we are home. Stinky tooth & breath still intact.  He could’ve stayed overnight and had the tooth taken care of in the morning, instead I gathered his terrified little fur self up into my arms and we went home. We’ll go back in the morning, but this evening, we have each other again. And I can see his little pink boy nipples where they shaved his chest & my heart is opened, broken & healed again. He lays across my arm as I write this, sleeping.