Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats

I wanted belonging to be something I could inherit, something I could step into fully formed. I imagined community as a space I could passively inhabit. It would be so many years before I learned that community was an action, something we build and rebuild and contribute to. That belonging is something we invent.

Feral, for all the wildness it implies, just means that an animal was abandoned by the system that created it.

I started an Instagram account for the cats because I had too much love form them, scary amounts of weird obsessive love for these creatures in my carport who could, at any moment just die. I had a creeping sense of how big my grief would become. I was inviting someone to share it with me. Please, I was saying. I cannot feel this much by myself.

It’s been years now. I have been asking him to haunt me.

Maybe if I had more money, I could be a better person.

It never occurred to me before to wonder what stars looked like to wild animals. If sunsets are beautiful to cats.

I am so often sad to my core.

She would prompt me, and I would stare dumbly back at her, thinking only about Monkey and hunger and the price of cat food. Do you think that if you had the security of knowing you would always be fed, and you would always have shelter, and you didn't have to worry about these basic parts of survival...? I finished for her: I would be different

I had begun to value my moments with cats not only as escapes from myself—chances to forget completely that I existed in a physcial form—but as ways to inhabit a truer sense of myself, a version of myself where I looked however I looked and it didn't matter. The cats didn't care.

My cat died and all I got was this bitter resentment. My cat died and all I got was this deep gnawing sadness.

I didn’t even drink, and with every social invitation I accepted I felt more and more inept, more deeply uncool, tagging along like someone’s little sister.

I fear I’ve made Dr. Big Butt more orange in my memory than he was in real life. I picture him so rust-colored and enormous, unlike any other cat that has ever lived. I rarely revisit pictures of him — they make me cry and he has grown so vast in my mind, so massive in my understanding of grief and despair and getting out of bed again, that he has taken on magnificent proportions, colors that cats don't even come in. In photos he is a regular orange cat. In my memory he's still walking toward me at sunset.

My identity had always been tied to achievable goals for which I would be rewarded with another report card, another publication, another prize. I had no idea who I was if I wasn’t a writer, and wasn’t that how it was supposed to be? hadn’t we all been asked since grade school what we wanted to be when we grew up? I had worked hard for it. I had defined myself by it.

Now all my friends are having babies. Every time someone announces their pregnancy, I feel a vague sense of loss I can't quite parse. I have all this care to give.

It never occurred to m e before to wonder what stars looked like to wild animals. If sunsets are beautiful to cats.

thinking about all the skinny cats that would circle our cars. Thinking: Maybe if I had more money

I knew that I was waiting in the dark for something other than stars.