Life Update: Two Anniversaries
May.
Few months bear any special kind of meaning to me, but May is definitely one of them. It is a month of many important dates, many anniversaries. A month of all kinds of emotions, both the good and the bad kind. And a lot of those emotions come together on one specific weekend of the month; the weekend we just lived through.
year three.
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“Has it really been three years already? I swear, I thought it was maybe two, but time has gone by so fast!”
Those were the words my girlfriend said to me this Friday, on 23rd May, as we were having our weekly video call on Discord. It was our three-year anniversary, three years of being together as a couple. It took me a while to really comprehend the reality of it all, because how the hell has it already been three years? My previous relationship lasted for a bit over three years, and that time felt like an eternity – at least compared to these past three years. It’s actually kind of insane just how much your perception of time is determined by whether you’re having a good time or not. And for me, right now, I can definitely say that I’ve had the best time ever.
Three years ago, I visited the United States for the first time in my life, as I was traveling over there to see my then-only-and-nothing-more friend. That trip ended up turning my whole world upside down in a way I should have seen coming (at least based on what everyone else around me said to me when I got back home and told them the news). But for some reason, the lesbian love blindness was really strong with this one, and it was a shock to me. Though, describing it as a shock makes it sound unpleasant when it was everything BUT that. I feel like it’s the only word to really describe the feeling, nonetheless. Because what the fuck, I’m actually in love with this girl??
Yes, yes you are, and have been for a long time. What a fucking idiot I was.
These three years have shown me what true love is like, what being in a relationship is actually supposed to be like, and how everything just stated is something that just comes to you naturally when you’re with the right person, how you will never have to ask for a cryptic relationship manual to figure out “what couples are supposed to do in order to be a couple”. And I know, without a doubt in my mind or heart, that they are the right person for me, now and forever, and that nothing will ever make me not choose them. And I hope that the mental image of me getting down on one knee in front of them is one brought to our reality eventually.
I love you so much, my princess, thank you for the most amazing three years of my life, and thank you for all the years after that ♡
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Number 5 is my unlucky number. Sometimes people have asked me about my lucky number, and I have never been able to give them an answer. Honestly, I don’t think I even have one at this point, because every time numbers have somehow been involved in my life, they have brought me nothing but misfortune and negativity. Though, no number has that been truer for than number 5.
But the reason for that has a set point in time, too. It was exactly ten years ago when the curse truly began.
I got my very first cat in 2004, when I was four years old. She was a black kitty, the prettiest void you’d ever seen. She was a rescue from a local shelter me and my mom visited that spring. I still remember how she looked when we entered the shelter: she was so tiny, way smaller than her sisters and brothers. She was sitting in a corner all by herself, looking scared and lonely. My mom noticed her as I did, asking the shelter owner about the tiny black kitten.
“Oh, her? She’s super anxious and scared of everyone. Her brothers and sisters have not let her eat, that’s why she’s so tiny. She’s malnourished too. Her momma tried to eat her at some point too, that’s why we had to separate the babies from the momma. Are you sure you want her?”
Because of how small the black kitten was, we had to wait some extra weeks until she was big enough to be given away. We visited the shelter multiple times over the weeks, and I tried to get closer to the kitty. The shelter owner had been right: she was a really scared and anxious kitten, not interested in making any type of connection with us. But over the weeks, she did start approaching us, getting out of the corner she’d been forced to stay in.
Eventually, we adopted the tiny black kitty. My mom named her Mimmi. She went to hiding for the first few weeks in our home, laying under furniture and not coming out as we called out for her. I got really sad for her, I was scared she would never want to befriend me.
“Pspspsps, Mimmi, come on, it’s your big sissy here…”
And she did come out, after all. Sniffing my hands, then slowly getting more comfortable with being in the same room as me and mom. She didn’t get too close to either one of us for the first year or so, but slowly and steadily she started spending time with us, even playing with me. We earned her trust by showing her that she made the decision on what she was comfortable with. We showed her the respect she’d been starved of. We fed her well, never letting her see her bowls get empty again. We let her come to us, not the other way around. And that’s how she started to trust us, seeing us as her equals. Sometimes she jumped on the couch and walked into my mom’s lap when we were watching TV. When I started my period and had really bad cramps as a teenager, bad enough to force me to stay home, Mimmi sensed I was feeling sick, and she climbed onto my lower tummy, curled up on it and started purring.
And then, came the year 2015, and May.
Mimmi hadn’t been eating normally for a week or two. She seemed a bit ill somehow, spending way more time with us than she normally would. Then, on May 25th, mom saw a drop of blood in her water bowl.
“I’m taking her to the vet to see what’s wrong”, mom said to me and left with my little sissy. When she came back, the carrier was empty.
I was shocked, asking mom what happened. Mom was crying, she hugged me and said, “Mimmi went to Heaven.”
I have never cried and screamed as loud as I did on that day. I was hysterical, for the next few hours I was screaming and crying and sobbing on my mom’s bed. We had not been prepared, not in the slightest. We didn’t even know she was sick. What was it that took my little sissy away from me?
Mimmi had a cancerous tumor in her mouth. It’s a very common cancer for domesticated cats apparently. It had been an aggressive case, too, in two weeks it took her out. There was nothing that could have been done to save her; it was better to let her go.
Mimmi’s passing traumatized me and my mom severely. It also started a chain of unfortunate and traumatic events in my family. 2015 was an awful year for me and mom, and it all started with our precious furbaby dying. We didn’t talk about Mimmi for years, not even after we’d adopted two new cats two years later. It was too painful to deal with.
Something that has bothered me since then was how I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to her. I didn’t know that when mom took her out in the carrier, I would never get to see her again. I’ve cried about it for all these years, even after an entire decade has passed. But one thing did happen soon after she had passed. I saw Mimmi visiting me two times that summer in 2015. Once, about a week or two after May 25th, and twice a few days later. I saw her tiny hind legs and her long silky black tail as she walked by my door. I always had the door to my room open until I decided to go to bed, mainly for Mimmi to come in if she wanted to. I had kept the door open even though she wasn’t there anymore. But she was, for a second; she came by to say goodbye to me.
About a week ago, when my bro was visiting me, we visited mom’s to go and feed our current furbabies as mom was out of town for a few days. We were sitting on the living room floor petting the kitties, when I heard the floor near my former room creak. One of the kitties turned around to look into that direction: there was no one there. At least no one visible.
But I know who it was. I know who came by to say hi to me again.
Celebrating & reminiscing,
ichigonya