Spaghettios

I met you in 2013 one day when I was walking home. Your name comes from a different cat, actually, one I coined as “Ravioli” who lived near the school that looked like you. You were so friendly and charming, always meowing at me, receptive to petting, and it tore me apart every day to leave you sitting on someone else’s doorstep unsure of what your fate would be. There was one day it overwhelmed me and, crying, I told you that I loved you so much and I cast a spell of sorts that nothing would ever harm you. The uncertainty of what could happen to you as an outdoor cat really pained me and I promised that you would always have my unconditional love.

As the years went by, we got much closer and you would be sitting on my doorstep instead, and one day in 2015 we finally let you in. You were still semi outdoors and would spend most of the day in my home, sitting beside me when I came home from school, and then at night we’d let you out to roam the streets. Again, even then, or especially then, I worried about you a lot – I know you’re a tough cat and I knew you got into fights, ate lizards, et cetera and it made me anxious to not know if you were safe out there. Sometimes you wouldn’t come back for days or weeks and I was terrified to think that you had died under a bush or hit by a car… but you always came back.

In the summer of 2016 before I left for college you got really sick. you were, no pun intended, catatonic; silent and completely unmoving when you had really always been as friendly and loving as a cat could be. We took you to the vet and they found that not only were you full of worms but your kidneys were at 75% failure too. They told us you had, at best, only a few months to live with chronic kidney failure. Those days were absolutely torturous, for both of us but of course more for you with the surgery and the IVs and the cone of shame. We took you in to live full time indoors as a proper domestic cat which I know bewildered you at first. I had to leave very soon after that and again I worried and worried about you and I hated to think that you could die while I was away. But somehow, miraculously, you pulled through so bravely and went on to live a full year and a half after that, and the days I came back to see you during the winter and summer breaks, you seemed to be in as perfect health as you could be, friendly, sweet, and a bit but not too fat.

Just a few days ago I heard you suddenly got much sicker and couldn’t eat or drink, and then yesterday I was told that your kidneys had failed completely and it would be best to put you to rest.

Of course at first I was in shock, I was in denial, I was enraged, I wanted to punish myself, I couldn’t understand it at all. Of course I know that I won’t be able to make a full recovery and there are probably plenty of times I will suffer again when I think of you. But for you I’ll do my absolute best to channel my love for you into positive energy and do good things in my life as I know that you’d want me to. I’d even eat a big fish for you and I think you know how much I hate fish.

Spaghettios, I truly love you more than anything in the world and I always, always will. I can say without a doubt you are the best cat that ever lived; to be honest, you’re most likely the best creature that ever lived. You deserved so much more but I’d like to think that I did as best for you as I could and I hope that I filled your life with half as much happiness as you did for me. My only request for you now is to promise that you know how much I love you. That’s enough for me. And who knows? I think we’ll meet again someday. Right now I have just a little bit of you with the roses from our backyard with me on a bracelet and I feel just that much closer. Even if I can’t see you again, I believe you will keep existing until the end of time perhaps in some grander form, reborn as a galaxy somewhere in space. In the end all I really want is for you to be eternally happy and I will use every fiber of being in my body to make it come true.

Love, Kelly | HI, USA

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