New Kitten

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
—C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

          
          In the dark room, a game commences. One sound is dull and brief: it is a book hitting the floor. A jug of lotion is louder, as it is (finally, successfully) toppled. Papers cascade—like a deck of cards being shuffled—under the pink pads of the kitten's paws as she grips some kind of starting line on the top of my desk. A couple of pieces of art deco pottery I somehow overlooked when I was taking everything out of the room yesterday have a sharp report as they are rearranged, in the darkness—and I am on my feet, cursing.
          Two tall, matching glass lamps on the nightstands will have to go.
          Twenty minutes later we are together with my book. She looks up at the pages approvingly from my armpit. Her purr is unexpectedly baritone for such a tiny creature, and it continues even when she sleeps—with her sturdy tail wound around her body like a spool, its dot of white paint at the very tip hidden beneath her.
          At feeding time I watch Gary's face as the kitten festinates about the room: he is in love. But I am not. Exactly two weeks ago I covered the space between my old cat's ears with kisses even after the injection had done its work. I left the room craning my head backward to the stainless steel table where she lay—in a strange blanket. I stepped outside into the lush fall morning and wailed into Gary's arms with a voice that didn't seem my own, despite all of my comic mimicry, my drunken singing in the kitchen. I had never heard my throat sound like that—as sudden and embarrassing as vomiting.
          That was love.
          This kitten is life, in all its abundant, metabolic banality.
          And now she is bouncing herself against the bedroom door like a calico tennis ball. She seems to have a bat's wings, when she appears from somewhere below the foot of the bed, her paws spread like a lab frog, her eyes like two olive-green saucers. Ten times a night I decline the offer of her butt, presented below a tail raised like a mainsail as she strolls between me and my book. No, thank you.
          The next day I scroll through my photos for the final picture I took of Bit. When I find it, I'm disappointed—she's just on one corner of the bed, cleaning herself. An excessively ordinary moment. I took photos of her every night, in DC, when she would stand like a striped amphora on my mother's dresser, clearly guarding me against bad dreams, leaving me water bugs and mice, teaching me self-respect. 
          That mesmerizing poise came at a high cost: she was too wild and frightened to be held, and her fear was bottomless and ugly when she'd dart in front of you, trying to escape but only becoming more entangled with your legs. Whatever early trauma she suffered, whenever it occurred, defined her. Yet its temporary passing—moments of security when her neck was being held down and groomed by Frannie or Holden, or when she sat on the toilet lid on a sort of proud, preoccupied sentry duty as I took a bath—was as ravishing as the slow movements of old music.
          She didn't wear her heart on her sleeve, like this kitten—hardly the size of a paperback, already a competent snuggler.
          Bit accompanied me—very much my own cat, a true friend, as it turned out—from my 46th year until my 60th. I am unexpectedly diminished without her silhouette on a piece of furniture, watching me like a soft grey bowling pin as I struggle to sleep.
          We sign our names again and again in the sand. Each morning requires of us some kind of unbiased, raw energy that becomes harder to muster. Memory is cheap.
          A vertical bar of light forms along the edge of the black-out shades. The kitten is still asleep, but the laces of all my shoes are frayed.