A Cat's Love

I’m borrowing a phrase from an Instagram post I saw years ago: a girl learns unconditional love from the cat she gets in her twenties.

I was nineteen when I got Boo—when Boo came to me—as I was doing college online from my childhood bedroom in Texas. Those were the days when we disinfected our groceries and left them to boil in the garage for two days before we brought them inside.

Boo and her sister, Roo, were fosters at first. A friend had connected me with a waitress at an upscale taco restaurant who posted vaguely socialist rants on Facebook and coordinated a kitten rescue in her free time. My mom and I drove to meet Socialist Taco Lady in the parking lot of a dental office.

I remember the first moment I saw Boo’s face. She was the first of the two kittens to peek out at us, with her big eyes, little white chin, and black-striped cheeks. She wasn’t named at that point—I asked—and I’m not sure where I got the name “Boo.” It just fit, small and round and adorable, just like her.

Boo was sick for a long time at the beginning. We were told the kittens were “recovering” from a minor respiratory infection, but Boo’s eyes were gunky, and she sneezed constantly, spraying out bloody snot for months. She also developed strange skin afflictions: a cyst on her shoulder grew to the size of a ping-pong ball. Since she wasn’t technically mine, I was supposed to contact Socialist Taco Lady before taking her to the vet. When I reported the cyst, socialist taco lady told me to bring Boo by PetSmart on Saturday and she’d “lance it.”

I didn’t know what my plan was, but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. Days later, the cyst burst on its own when Boo ran down the stairs. We drained it (it was gross). Then, she was fine. No more cysts since.

Despite her problems, Boo charmed me instantly. She curled under my desk while I worked, made surprise appearances during Zoom French class. She chased toys and attacked rolls of toilet paper. She (and Roo) slept on my bed with me every night, beginning the very first night they were with me. How honored I was that this little creature felt my bed was the safest place to spend the night.

I should describe her to you. She’s a tabby, on the smaller side, around ten pounds, with big eyes that still look kitten-like. Her fur is unbelievably soft (my brother will stick his face in her fur and call it “Boo Fur Therapy”) and dark brown, striped with black, punctuated by a snow-white chest, belly, and paws.

At this point, we were all still operating under the pretense that Boo and Roo would go back to Socialist Taco Lady when I returned to North Carolina for in-person classes. My dad later would tell me, “I knew those cats were never going back.”

And they didn’t. Roo went to my grandmother in New Mexico, and Boo came to live in a Chapel Hill sublet with me. I said it was because Boo had more health problems, but the reality was that Boo was special to me. I loved her little white paws and incessant sneezing and need to be right next to me no matter what I was doing. Roo was capable, a cat’s cat, stoic and independent. Boo was my cat. Is my cat.

I was twenty by that point, when Boo and Charlsie became a little team that set out alone together. I’m twenty-five now, and she’s five-and-a-half. Together we have lived in three different states, ridden planes and trains, driven cross-country, stayed in hotel rooms. She’s seen me single and in a relationship, a size fourteen and a size eight, an undergraduate and a law student, employed and unemployed, rejected and accepted, lost and found.

Boo isn’t the first time I’ve felt unconditional love, because I’m lucky to have parents whose love is constant and unfailing. But, the reason that first Instagram post rings true to me, is because a cat’s love is without expectations. Your twenties are a decade full of expectations, the expectations the world has for you, the expectations you have for yourself. If you’re not careful, it can become a decade of comparing and measuring, using those ubiquitous yardsticks of salary, education, and relationship status.

The status of an animal’s consciousness and soul is debatable, and it’s true that Boo doesn’t have the capacity to care about my grade in Constitutional Law, my current weight, or the amount of money in my checking account. But just because she can’t judge me like a fellow human might doesn’t diminish the fact that she doesn’t. She loves me anyway, without condition and without expectation. And that is what a girl in her twenties truly needs: love that is constant and simple, at a time when life seems anything but.

A human’s relationship with a cat is without expectation, but it isn’t automatic, and it’s not a guarantee. It took Boo a year to sit on my lap, longer than that to sit on anyone else’s lap.

You have to earn a cat’s trust. Boo trusts me because for over four years, I have shown her kindness and consistency. I make sure she’s taken care of when I’m not here. I provide her with clean, comfortable spaces to sleep, eat, and play. I speak to her in kind tones, and I pet her with kind hands. She’s realized that I’m not going anywhere, that I’m here for her and I’ll take care of her, and that when I leave, I always come back.

And as a result, she is there for me. All she asks for is my kindness and my company, and she reflects it back to me tenfold. What other interaction is so pure and so simple?

I didn’t pick Boo out of a litter of kittens, didn’t choose her from a display at a pet store. She was handed to me by the universe, perhaps God, working through Socialist Taco Lady, to be exactly what I needed during this phase of life. Because I will probably outlive Boo, I know that. Another Instagram quote: a pet is only there for part of your life, but you are there for their whole life. I can’t imagine a better honor.  

Boo, about 8 months old, and me, 20 years old