Two humans walk into an animal shelter

How my cats taught me to let things be

Last week, I walked into my bedroom and gasped.

In the disarray of the unmade comforter lied a sight rarely seen in our household: our two cats, Roxie and Rosie, curled around one another, spooning like they had just awoke on a Sunday morning.

Our cats tolerate each other. It’s been like that from the beginning. We adopted them out of the same room at the same shelter. Rosalita (Rosie), our gray tabby, then Andromeda, followed my husband around the room like a shadow. I had hoped to find either a black or a long-haired cat — my husband directed my attention to Roxane (Roxie, and her name is one N for my writing queen

Roxane Gay

), our long-haired tortoise-shell, then Sweet Pea, reclined in the top of a tower in the middle of the room, weary of no one taking her spot. They each chose us. We hoped their previous proximity meant they’d get along well in their new home.

I was full of hope in so many ways when we walked into that shelter. We had been debating for months when the right time to adopt would be and we finally pulled the trigger. These would be the first animals that I adopted as an adult that felt wholly, responsibly mine.

I’ve always loved animals, but I feel a particular calmness with cats. My dad had hunting dogs growing up, German Short-haired Pointers named Darby and Maggie, and when I was 13 we adopted our Shih-tzu Poodle mix, Shiloh, who turned 15 last month and whom I’ve loved fiercely as I’ve grown up. But it was my outdoor country cat, Chica, who enlightened me to the quiet sweetness of a feline friendship.

My mom is severely allergic to cats, so Chica lived around our home in the middle of nowhere. She had five toes on each paw and gave births to hordes of kittens with too many toes themselves, courtesy of both our ignorance to the cruelty of not getting her fixed and the neighbor’s tom cat who made the rounds to all of the rural homes. I would sometimes fall asleep with her in my bed before one of my parents put her outside, and eventually she learned to claw open the screen door on warm summer days. She was calm and sweet and I loved walking down the road from the school bus to find her waiting for me on the porch.

My college roommate adopted an orange cat named Auggie on a whim our sophomore year. We weren’t allowed to have pets, so when our landlord discovered him about six months later, I took on the task as the only medicated person in the house to convince my doctor to write a legally-useless-but-enough-for-the-landlord note that said he was my emotional support animal. Every day when I’d come home from class and lie in my bed, he’d curl up on my chest while I scrolled through my phone and we’d decompress from the day together. He excelled in his fake position.

I wanted my first experience with my own indoor cats to be a snuggly, affectionate, mushy romp with two creatures who couldn’t get enough of me. I wanted to wake up at 3 am smothered by their scrumptious little bodies stretched across my neck.

I realized pretty quickly that wasn’t going to be our story. Roxie spent the first three days hiding under the couch when she wasn’t eating. Rosie loved to be in the same room as us but squirmed out of our arms the moment we picked her up. We’d swing toys through the air and marvel at how high Rosie could jump before Roxie slink into the room and snatch it out of the air, turn lockjaw and growl like a deranged Rottweiler, before slinking right back to the bedroom where no one could have any fun. That behavior eventually went away when she accepted she was no longer in a room with 20 cats, but man did it make us wonder if she had us, and the people who named her Sweet Pea, fooled.

(Playing together still doesn’t come naturally to them; their games of chase typically end in Roxie not realizing how hard she’s biting and Rosie screaming for dear life and Roxie looking confused as to why she’s getting yelled at.)

Cardboard boxes litter our apartment now. They’re Rosie’s favorite objects. She runs to them desperately like when she seems anxious, when the butt scratches are too divine, when she wants to be in the same room as one of us but isn’t ready for physical touch. She wraps her feet under her like a loaf of bred and will often fall asleep with her chin resting on the edge. The sight regularly makes me cry. It also embarrasses me, because I remember that at some point in those first few months of cat ownership, I told my husband I didn’t feel like Rosie was my cat. Roxie eventually began curling up on my legs for an hour while I read at night. Rosie, I felt like I couldn’t crack. It was like we were always walking around each other and nodding politely.

But slowly, those nods turned into smiles and the drive-by pets turned into a constant upturned belly on the floor. She was the first to walk up to us when we walked through the door, chin extended. She joined us by the toilet any time it was in use, jumped between the curtains to watch us shower. She was, and still is, the bathroom cat.

The nicknames piled up. Bathroom Kitty. Box Kitty. Rosie Rose. Rosie Posey. Number One Sweetie. Smallest Girl in the World. Smush Face. Bread Loaf. For Roxie — Foxy Roxie. Roxanina. Gremlin. Owl Eyes. Spooky. Fluffy. Peanut Head. No Bones. I fell more in love with my husband through our shared lore of our cats, how we’d walk into the bathroom with a cat in our arms to announce they have the HARDEST life in the whole world or capture as many photos as we can of Roxie with her tongue hanging out. Imagining Rosie’s life as a hustler out on the streets. We built worlds within our little family over the last four years.

It’s interesting now to notice how intensely I wrote a narrative for these cats. I suppose I’ve been crafting plot in most of my relationships my whole life. Whether a doomed friendship or a rescued animal, my expectations always emerge beaten down and war torn with barely any form to recognize. They were never that joyous anyway.

Instead I find joy from Rosie curled up in her favorite gray blanket on the couch next to me, or how she’s recently begun hunkering down on my husband’s chest in the middle of the night. Roxie now begs to jump onto my blanketed lap when I work from home; I’m typing this sentence around her body splayed across my sternum, kind of how I hoped we’d sleep together.

Stories write themselves even when you’re busy living them.

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