Eight Fluffy Years

It’s exactly eight years since we found our cat, or rather, since she found us. People adopt strays all the time so maybe this is a banal thing to post about, but I still think about that day a lot. It’s a really special memory for Lia and me both.

We’ve been living in Prague for roughly six months at that point, in a dinky apartment on the ground floor. One evening as we were just hanging out in the living room, we heard a faint "meow" coming from behind our door.
"It's a cat! Go! Let her in!" Lia said without hesitation. At first I thought that she was joking, but no. Thinking back on it makes me chuckle every time. It just caught me off-guard, I guess!

So anyway, I open the door and sure enough, there is a cat right on our doormat. Without even looking up, she walks in like it's something she's done hundreds of times before. No caution, nothing. She walks past both of us, heads straight for the living room, jumps up on the couch and rolls into a little ball. Minutes later, she's asleep. A place she's never been in, with two strangers that are sitting right next to her and trying to process what just happened.

We remembered a lost cat poster that had been on the front door of the building for a few days. Turns out one of the neighbors found one a few days ago and is looking for the owner. There's a phone number at the bottom.

An elderly man, with a thick accent that I can't quite place, picks up the phone. “Yes, that’s the one,” he confirms.

Apparently he already has an old cat and she's been quite aggressive to the stray. He's been letting the little one out into the hallway to keep them separate, as it's not really an option in his place. That explains her wandering around the building, and perhaps also why she was so eager and unafraid to get inside.
"I'm old and I can't keep another cat. I can barely take care of this one with my pension", he says, pleading. "You should keep her. You sound like somebody who cares about animals."

Lia started searching local Facebook groups, but nobody seemed to be looking for this cat. She did, however, find a couple of young women who took care of her for a while. I'm a little hazy on the details, it's been long, but enough to say that they've seen her in the neighborhood and I think they helped the old man take care of her, too. One of them lived right across the street and offered to provide us with the basics, enough to get us through the weekend. A bit of dry food and snacks, a small litter box her own cats no longer use, and a couple of toys. I don't think she'll ever see this post but I'll always be grateful for that help early on, and especially for cat sitting when we had to travel home for Christmas weeks later. We really had nobody else to ask for it at that point.

Monsters

Coming back from that Christmas family visit, we still weren’t quite sure if we’d keep her, but there really seemed no way to track the owner. We didn’t really want to keep her. Before we moved to Prague, we actually took care of a cat for somebody for about six months. We really liked and we even thought about adopting a cat...eventually. Lia and myself agreed not to have kids very early on. Obviously having a cat and having a kid is not the same, but for us, at the time, it felt like having one. I worked at a tiring job that didn't pay great, and now I was also getting woken up multiple times a night, and had to spend money on stuff that I didn't need before. Traveling or even visiting family now meant having to find a cat sitter. We had to cat-proof the place and, going forward, consider what stuff we can even have out on a shelf.

We didn't ask for this responsibility, however small.
We didn't want it.
We resented it.
We were holding off on giving her a name because giving her one means she stays. We just kept calling her Micka—a most generic cat name with no real personal attachment. That's still her name now, just one of many.

Looking back, it might seem dumb but that’s just how it was at the time. Not only did we feel frustrated and forced into something, we also felt like monsters for even thinking that. I guess all this is to say that these feelings are valid. It's fine to feel unprepared and frustrated, and takes a while to work through it. We felt terrible because we didn't want to talk about that part with other people, and because we didn't really hear other people sharing similar experiences with their own pets or kids.

Some months after, we suddenly had an opportunity to move to a much bigger place. This meant ending contract for the old place early, which in turn meant dealing with our landlord. Surprising nobody, we didn’t particularly care for the man! Pets weren't officially allowed, not for us anyway. There were a bunch of cats and dogs, and landlord had to know because he lived in the building himself, but I guess those were kind of...grandfathered in? Anyway, we never told him about ours. Having to terminate the contract early, we were still living there when the landlord and his real estate agent came in, and were supposed to show the place to a bunch of prospective renters. It was only then that he learned about the cat, and we had to explain that we didn’t have the heart to leave her on the street. On this particularly sunny day, she sat on top of a kitchen table, greeting everyone who passed her coming in. She just put people in a good mood right away. The real estate agent jumped at the opportunity and started cracking jokes. “See, even the cat likes it here,” or “the cat is not included, sorry!” The old landlord seemed immediately enamored by her, surprisingly even more so after she scratched him as he tried to pet her. It was a weird day but I remember it fondly just because of her.

At that point, we had no idea that this new place we were moving to would be where we’d spend most of our days because of a little thing known as GLOBAL COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

Lia still had to work on site, but I was fully remote, using a spare room as an office. I was alone most of the time—well, I would’ve been if not for Micka. Only then I realized what a blessing her arrival was. Just being able to look over at her, sleeping on a cabinet next to my desk was tremendous for my wellbeing. She’s also pretty much the reason why my mom got a cat during this time, and then another. She’s become a crazy cat lady, and my step-dad, initially opposed, would now have you believe he was never against it. They’re certified cat sickos, every crevice of the place filled with cat toys and scratching posts.

Now we’re in a completely different neighborhood after our third and, hopefully, final move in this city. A lot has changed for us in the last eight years, but Micka remains a constant source of both joy and annoyance. Life would be so much more boring without her.

I hope you stick around for another eight years, at least. I love you.