My cat is missing. We’re buying a house. The lease on our apartment is up. We’ve moved into the inlaws’ house, and the cat is missing. I have a lot to be happy about, like the house, and the inlaws letting us live here rent free till we close on the house, and the fact that we are out of our over-stuffed apartment. And I have freelance work to do, and meetings ahead, and a great idea for a  new writing project. But I’m not thinking much about those things right now because the cat is missing.

I won’t call her lost, although of course that’s what I fear. We put her in the car, like we’ve done before, and drove across town with her making angry noises. The seats were folded down to accomodate the boxes we’d been moving, and she got underneat them, hiding in the back driver’s side footwell. It didn’t worry me because that’s what she’d done before. And when I opened the car to get her out in this strange new place she’s never seen, I planned to pick her up and snuggle her like I’ve done before, and cradle her close to me until I could deposite her in our temporary bedroom, along with her litter box, food, scratching post and toys. But while I was unfolding the seats to get her out from the crevisce she’d stuffed herself into, she took advantage of my ill-timed glance in the wrong direction. She bolted. She went into the woods, and long story short, the cat is missing.

Of course, we tried to catch her. Of course, we knew she’d keep getting further away. We tried herding her, and she got right back out to the edge where the woods meet the more civilized back yard, but she bolted again, going further and faster each time. She kept on meowing to let us know she was furious, and as long as we could hear her, we kept following. But when she got into the thorny brush on the up-side of the hill on the other side of the neighbor’s yard, we gave up. Turned around, went inside. Put her food on the back deck just in case, and resigned ourselves to the knowledge that the cat’s gone missing.

Poor cat. Poor stupid cat. Come back, goddamnit. If she doesn’t come back, I might never get another pet. Not because I love her that much. I do love her. Not because I’m that heartbroken. I am heartbroken. But really because I think I’m bad at having pets. This isn’t the first one I’ve lost. And truthfully, I did everything wrong. I didn’t have her in a carrier. I didn’t keep my eye on her. I chased her when I should’ve just let her come to me. But at least I had her spayed.

So this is my Monday Night Nonfiction. This is my truth right now: I am beating myself up for letting a poor, dumb, beloved animal get lost because I scared the hell out of her by putting her in a car in the first place, and now the cat is missing.

Tags: animals | cat | Monday-Night-Nonfiction | moving

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