I adopted her in 2018, impulsively, the way most good decisions in my life have been made.
She’s been with me across three countries since then — through grey English winters, through a stint in Canada, and now here, in a San Diego apartment where the light comes in sideways in the afternoon and she stations herself in it like she owns the place. Seven years. She has outlasted most of my certainties.
I think about this sometimes when I’m watching her. She has no memory of those moves, no narrative about what they meant. She just recalibrated each time — found the warmest corner, claimed the best patch of window, resumed her routine as if geography were irrelevant. There’s something I’m still trying to learn from that.
She sleeps sixteen hours a day and feels nothing about it. Not guilt, not the low-grade anxiety of “I should be doing something.” She just sleeps, and when she’s awake, she’s completely awake — alert, curious, fully in the room. I used to watch her rest and feel vaguely envious of the simplicity. Now, I think she’s just correctly calibrated to what a body actually needs, and I’m the one running a broken program.
The other thing she does, which I find quietly instructive, is ask for things directly. She headbutts me when she wants company. She sits by her bowl. She meows at the window when she wants to watch the birds. No performance, no hinting, no “I’m fine” when she isn’t. There’s a kind of dignity in that directness that I’ve spent most of my adult life not practicing.
What she’s given me, more than anything, is the experience of connection without effort. She doesn’t need me to be interesting, productive, or emotionally available in any particular way. She just wants to be near. Some of my most settled moments in the last few years have been ordinary ones — she curled on my lap while I’m at my desk, both of us quiet, doing nothing especially meaningful together. I didn’t know that was something I needed until I had it.
She’s been my most constant companion through the part of life that was supposed to be formative and was mostly just hard. I’m not sure what I taught her in return. Probably nothing. But she seems content with the arrangement.