Up until a month ago, this was the closest thing to a cat that I had:
But now, I have a real cat that purrs and everything. And when I feed him, it actually goes in his mouth instead of just falling from the pink stitching and hitting the floor. Sorry, pillow cat, you’ve been replaced.
When I brought real cat home from the SF SPCA, he almost immediately started suckling pillow cat.
At first I thought, “Okay, it’s a new environment for him and he was a stray who was likely taken from his mother at an early age. Normal enough.” But he kept at it. And then he left a large wet stain on it and even though I was totally over pillow cat, part of me didn’t want to face the possibility that maybe I was the one who had been dumped.
Things didn’t get much better from there. Frisco spent most of his day on a towel rack in my closet. The only exceptions were normal cat things like eating, making me feel inferior in every way possible and of course, a quickie with pillow cat. And there I was in the background – out of focus and watching from afar.
I was jealous of a pillow and he knew it. I think it fueled him. Because as soon as I decided to stop pulling him away from the pillow to pet him or ask him what he thought about my outfit, he began to wean himself. He started sitting in my lap, following me around the house and (slowly) accepting my presence. He actually liked me. Maybe.
However, this is also around the time when he started prompting me to Google things like “Xanax for cats” and “Is NyQuil safe for cats if only using half a cap?” Being off the synthetic tit changed him. He started staying up for most of the night and playing with all sorts of cables. But he only really focused on the ones connected to the things I love the most – the TV and my computer. He nearly knocked an entire cup of cranberry juice on my keyboard and made numerous attempts to push my laptop off the desk. He sits in front of the TV right as I’m trying, for the third time, to figure out why Ron and Sam are fighting. He chews on my headphones. He tries to interrupt anything I do that doesn’t involve napping with him.
I distracted him from what he loves and now he’s doing the same to me. I’m in a codependent relationship with my cat. When he’s not sitting near me, he perches himself in a place where he can watch me. Sometimes, like right now, he drifts off to sleep and I’m able to get online.
But once he figures out how to disable the router, I’m fucked.
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