2021 was a crummy year, personally.

The second and third quarters of the year were marred by a gnarly situationship and its attendant mindfuckery that wreaked havoc on my body. I lost twenty pounds in two months and discovered a bizarre heart condition after a dizzy spell took me to urgent care. In the midst of all this, during a visit home to my family, my father suffered life-threatening complications from a routine surgery and had to be rushed to the hospital, where he spent weeks recovering. (As terrifying as those weeks were, I’d give anything to be back there now.)

There will eventually be an essay about the months of manipulation by the ex in question. There have already been several poems. But after I finally severed the cord (after a final round of manipulation so comically grandiose that everyone who hears the story laughs in shock), I felt the strong desire to become hard as nails. I was manic with indignation. This manifested in trivial ways, like changing the look of my bitmoji avatar to dark eyeliner and a black moto jacket. In witchy ways, like throwing a lit match, a palmful of salt, and strips of paper on which I’d written “Get the fuck out” into a tiny iron cauldron bought from an occult store, and sprinkling the resulting salty black ash on the sidewalk in front of my house. In painful and expensive ways, like getting a new tattoo on my inner bicep (though that one was a more joyful experience, as it was a walk-in matching tattoo with my best friend).

But there was one big commitment I knew I needed to finally make.

It was time to get a cat.

I’d never been the caretaker of an animal in my adult life, minus the brief time a stray cat wandered into my house in Santa Cruz, and we fed her and named her Javelina Bagel for a few weeks before she wandered away again.

I went to the shelter thinking I would get a female black kitten. But the thing about adopting animals is you kind of have to let them choose you. A kitten just wasn’t in the cards, because the shelter prefers to adopt them out in siblings. I visited many lovely cats, but didn’t really know what criteria to choose them with.

But when a six-year old stocky male cat with a short blunt tail belly-flopped in front of me and rubbed against my calves, the friend I’d brought with me said, “You’ve been chosen!” I had found the furry roommate to bring home.

I brought him home on November 1st, a Monday. The eighth anniversary of moving in to my apartment. The third anniversary of the day the aforementioned ex had, fatefully, arrived on the scene. I was in a foul mood on this particular evening because, despite my best efforts to remain flinty and jagged, the events of the summer were still affecting my soft emotional core. This poor cat had to get used to a new house and a strange lady crying on the couch. I’m not making this up: he put his paw on my hand. I named him Ludo, after the gentle giant beast in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. He’s the only character immune to The Goblin King’s hypnotic powers. It was a necessary allegory for me at the time.

Ludo, the cat, weighs somewhere between 15 and 17 pounds. He is built like a linebacker, and when he jumps off the bed, it sounds like a sack of potatoes hitting the floor. His stern, panther-like expression belies his true cuddleslut nature; he will demand attention, especially belly rubs, from any and all guests. I’ve recently learned he is likely part Russian Blue, a breed known for their extremely affectionate personalities.

He is also, like his Jim Henson counterpart, very, very loud. The loudest cat I have ever heard. Not the demur mews or scared shrieks you might be imagining, but a gurgly baritone so resonant that people on the other end of the phone can hear him, even if he’s in a different room. Ludo in Labyrinth has command over all the rocks, a skill advantageous in muppet battle. When he howls, the rocks of the land, sentient, roll toward the sound. I like to think that’s what my Ludo is doing when he lets his cantankerous yodels rip at 5:30am, though he’s more likely announcing his litterbox itinerary.

He sleeps for most of the day, until 3-ish, when he wakes up, startled like a kid waking from a bad dream, thumps onto the floor, and races with urgent meows to find me.

He does not give a fuck about catnip. It does nothing to him.

He gets bouts of the evening “zoomies,” which send him racing into the bedroom to yowl at ghosts in the closet before charging in the opposite direction and bonking into the living room wall.

He might be sexist. Given the choice, he seems to prefer the attention of men in the room to that of women. On the couch, he often foregoes my lap in favor of my boyfriend’s.

If you pet him and then stop petting him, he will swat at your hand.

In general, the only thing he wants is to be near me. I’ve learned that this is typical of Russian Blues. He’s like a loyal dog.

I feel grief by proxy when I see him mournfully gazing out the window at neighborhood cats loitering in the backyard. He’s a permanent indoor cat and can’t be mingling outside, even with potential friends.

If I had more money and a bigger house, I would adopt a friend for him.

He has zero attention span. You can probably get 30 seconds of string toy play with him, tops. He was interested in the electronic mouse I bought him for about two minutes and then forgot about it.

Sometimes when he meows it sounds like Suzy Eddie Izzard saying “Ciao.”

He is obsessed with the sun, and on mornings when it hasn’t broken through the clouds yet, he often yells at me like he’s lodging a complaint to the manager.

When I saw the Oscar-winning animated feature Flow, I cried and hugged him and said something cheesy and ridiculous like, “I’ll keep you safe from an apocalyptic flood!”

I’m preemptively sad thinking about the day I’ll have to say goodbye to him. He turned ten this year, and if I’m lucky, he’ll still be with me into my early 50s. Time is weird! So is my cat.