The Liberated Liberator

When I loved you
And you loved me,
You were the sea,
The sky, the tree.

Now skies are skies,
And seas are seas,
And trees are brown
And they are trees.

– Charles A. Wagner

mingus did not always love me. love happened slowly, as slowly and lazily as herself, a-curling on a hot day.

if you are keeping tabs, you might interject here and question whether a cat is capable of love, and if she is, how can i tell that she loves me, and not the tuna i feed her?

i can’t. i can’t tell. i don’t know. i am not a doctor of cat psychology. and, as long as we are on the subject, replace “cat” with “human”, and i would be just as rudderless.

so.

mingus loves me now because she kneads my body with delicate paw pads and daggering nails, over and over and over again before bedtime, and she loves me now because when she sees me, she flops her belly skyward in search of my foot, stretching like a lady stepping out of a bath.

when we first met, she only tolerated me. this was, of course, after the initial feline W!T!F!, initiated whenever a new bipedal comes within sniffing range. more accurately: at the very start, she saw me, darted under a furniture, and remained there.

after it was apparent that i intended to stay, she might sometimes reluctantly look to me for a pet. if master was gone, she might even grace my lap briefly, though antsy and malcontent.

the wooing process took years, years, including a transitional period wherein her gray and white brother moved to logan square and was replaced with a scrawny, clueless furball, whom we christened magellan, but call li'l man. magellan has since evolved to the status of Bro Cat, though when we first got him, he was a miserably unteachable kitten, full of excited trust and impossible stupidity.

mingus hated him for about a year. now they cuddle contentedly, as long as they think we are not watching. soon after she learnt to tolerate the li'l man, mingus relented against me as well, as if one adaptation made the other possible. she would even sleep next to me on the bed, smothered in winter light, while i read or crept around on google. in turn, i discovered that her preferred greeting is a delicate sniff, an apertif to love, of extended human forefinger, three to six inches away from her primrose pink nose.

if mingus’s love for me exists, as i suspect it does, it was born of necessity, just as mine was born from gratitude. she misses me when i am not there, or at least she expresses concern when i am returned, as if to say: you left, my life was different. it was not as good, even.

this is more than you can hope for, from a cat as shy and choosey as mingus. luckily, there are no words to ruin our relationship, and nothing she can do that is so against her nature that she would cease to be herself. in this way, loving a cat is much, much easier than a loving human. but i’ll wait and watch, in case it isn’t.