An Excerpt From My Short Story "Four Cats And A Life Improved"

Hello! Tomorrow it’ll be two years to the day since our loving Simba died, and I thought now might be a good time to share the opening of my short story Four Cats And A Life Improved, which I started writing in the aftermath of his death.

The original story was a ghost story, where I died and became a ghost and had to get back to Jånni (Gianni in the story), Simba’s brother, to tell him he was still loved, but thankfully I sent the first draft out for feedback, and I got some suggestions that made me turn it into a much better and more real story.

I’m not a consistent writer, at least not yet, so it took me over a year to finish the story, and then a further six or so months to actually publish it. I’ve only published it on Amazon Kindle, but I know a lot of people have legitimate issues with Amazon, and I am looking into other publishing platforms for future works.

In this post I’ve included the opening few pages of the story, which is available for 99c on Amazon at this link:

https://a.co/d/2kooovy

In advance I’d like to apologize for any formatting errors in this post, as I don’t have a computer and copying and pasting is hard on a tablet!

Four Cats And A Life Improved

My family didn’t have any pets as I was growing up, so I didn’t get to know that particular pleasure of life until I was an adult. Getting to know some wonderful cats through a housemate and then a girlfriend might have saved me though.

Simba was rolling around on the floor, posing for pictures on Saturday, and everything was just fine. He went up to his room as he usually did, it was a safe space from his sometimes aggressive brother Gianni, and it wasn't until several hours later when I went up to tell him I was going out that I realized something was wrong.

He wasn't lying in his chair, instead he was lying on the top of the stairs, on the floor. I petted him a little, and told him I was leaving, and then went downstairs and told my girlfriend he was lying on the floor before heading out for some drinks with the boys. I didn’t think too much of it.

When I got home some hours later he was still lying on the floor upstairs, and alarm bells started going off deep in my gut. I suddenly realized it was a little over two and a half years since I met him, and though I wasn’t a big believer in anything like fate, I had always had a suspicion the universe was out to get me.

My life had improved so much in the last three years, it made sense to me it would turn sour again, a doubt about my current happiness always lingering right underneath the surface. There was no way the universe was gonna let me stay happy and well.

On Sunday he came downstairs a couple times and had some water, but he didn't touch the food. We knew we had to take him to the vet and my girlfriend booked us an appointment after work on Monday.

When I went to bed that night, I lay awake filled with dread, anticipating the worst. He was going to be taken away from me, this little bundle of love that had adopted me as his dad, and it was going to be awful.

I cried silently by Annika, doomed to despair and having no doubt the good times were over. Simba dying would definitely bring me down into a new depression. The only question was if I would be stuck down in the depths for an extended period like in the old days, or if my work and growth had made me more resilient to handle loss and it’d be a passing thing, like grief is supposed to be.

I'd been struggling with depression on and off since my early teens and it wasn’t until I met Tubby in my mid twenties via a roommate that I saw how much connection could help, even with an animal, and it made me open up more to my friends and family. That beautiful boy showed me unconditional love in a new way I had never experienced. His actual name was bad, I don’t even remember it all these years later, but he was fine with me calling him Tubby, because he understood it came from a place of affection.

At first I'd been reluctant to get too close, but I soon realized resistance was futile when a cat chose you. He showed me it was possible to be loved, something I'd sort of written off as not happening for me.

Don't get me wrong, I was lucky enough to grow up in a loving home with parents who loved me, and a brother as well. But familial love seemed like a given at that time, like of course they love me, they have to. If they weren't forced to, they wouldn't even like me.

So Tubby meant a lot, not just literally, but also in my growing into a better man, a better person. I wouldn't be the man I am today if he'd never showed me what unconditional love meant when it came from someone who chose to love me.

His love was an important first step in me understanding the very human need for connection, and even in trying to be a better man. That cat made me be more open to the world as a whole, and I opened up to people about my mental struggles for the first time. It’s not good to keep it bottled up inside, because there’s no chance of healing then. You need to let others help you. That’s what being a human is all about.

My issues with mental health, particularly depression, had started around the age of fourteen. Anxiety and panic attacks became part of life after a while. For the next sixteen years I’d go in and out of more serious bouts of depression, and sometimes I’d slip out of them for seemingly random reasons. I remember the first time it eased off, I was just admitting to myself that I was depressed. Then it’d come sneaking back, sometimes stronger, sometimes as a blanket just covering me up softly, but more or less always there.

I thought that was as good as it’d get. I thought that was life. I assumed everyone was feeling the same way as me, just always slightly off, never being able to make the good times last. As soon as I was alone again, the blanket wrapped around me.

There’s this human need for connection, for love, for community, that I hadn’t appreciated or even understood until Tubby opened my eyes to how much someone else could mean. I’d been too focused on myself all these years, my whole life, to even understand that I wasn’t living right. Tubby made it clear to me that there is more to life than just surviving on your own. You need others.

Then after around two years of that unconditional love between me and him, he got sick and died.

That affected me a lot, because in a way it was the first time I'd experienced death as an adult. I’d lost most of my grandparents while I was a kid, and the last one died right as I was turning eighteen. I can’t really say I knew any of them as people, I was too young to appreciate them for what they were.

I swore I'd never love anyone ever again after losing Tubby because love only ended in heartbreak and loss. That was my depression drawing its own conclusion of course, but at the time I really believed it. I believed my depression about a lot of things back then.

When someone asked my roommate if she was gonna get a new cat that very week, I was deeply offended, because you wouldn't ask someone who just lost a human friend or relative if they were going to replace them. A sort of childish way to look at it perhaps, but I was a deeply flawed human being at the time, and Tubby had literally meant the world to me.

Time passed, and that same roommate rescued another cat a few months later. I honestly tried to keep my distance once more and not get so attached again. I was afraid of inevitably losing him too.

He obviously won me over pretty fast and once again I had the unconditional love of a little cat to help me feel better about the sorry state my life was in at the time.

At this time I had started going frequently to therapy, getting help, and started the work of constantly trying to improve myself and get better, both mentally, but also as a friend and family member. It was a real struggle. I'd been diagnosed with schizotypal disorder after a few sessions, which is basically schizophrenia light. There were a couple other disorders to go along with it, most notably severe depression.

Both Tubby and Lucifer really helped me with that. Being alone with them I wasn't as alone as I'd felt all of my adult life. There was this little being on the couch next to me, who looked at me with nothing but love and adoration. And I felt the same thing back to them, feeling a new kind of love, not the familiar love I'd never even considered much before this time. Of course I loved my family, everyone does, and there's no problem there. Incredibly naive.

I also read about schizotypal disorder on my own, as I hadn't heard of it before, and read about tips on how to deal with depression as well. Normal human things to do, curious about oneself, and wanting to become a better man.

I’d been fairly lucky with my schizotypal diagnosis, it could’ve been a lot worse. I didn’t have hallucinations like most people associate with schizophrenia, but through therapy I remembered that I’d had this one voice throughout my teen years.

At that time I hadn’t even registered it as abnormal, I thought everyone had a voice constantly telling you you were bad at everything, that everything you did you didn’t do good enough. That you should just kill yourself now instead of bothering those who loved you.

I also remember at some point distinctly telling myself that I wasn’t going to kill myself, no matter what the voice said. Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure that it came from watching some old movie with Kurt Russell where his character lost a son, and he said the line “No parent should outlive their son.”

Important life lessons and decisions can come from the strangest places I suppose.

Now that voice did disappear at some point, but I do not remember when. Until therapy, I’d actually forgotten all about it. But the depression I suspect it helped instigate lingered. Over the following years I’d go in and out of more or less serious bouts of depression, sometimes triggered by the most random things, always being there in some sense. Now that I’m healthy, I cannot believe what I thought was healthy in times past.

The schizotypal stuff had been a bit heavier, leading to a couple stays at a mental health facility after going into psychosis. Psychosis sounds scary, and it is, but for me it meant being a sort of passenger in my own body for a while, not really being in charge. My very thoughts would be different, a little off.

The first time it happened I watched myself go into the kitchen and get a knife, and hurt myself for the first time. I continued to do this, even after exiting psychosis. It helped in its own way. It does have a therapeutic effect, even if it should absolutely be discouraged.

Later I would enter and exit psychosis a bit more regularly, and I wouldn’t really notice until a few days in. I’d recognize a pattern of me acting strangely, unusually, not quite like myself.

One time after watching a particularly bad big movie in theaters a second time, really hating it both times, not really understanding why I went a second time, I told my friends I’d walk home instead of catching a ride. In the rain.

The day after I went for a walk with no destination, also in the rain. And I never do these things, but as I was walking I realized I was in a new psychosis, because the only other time in my adult life where I’d gone walking with no purpose, in rain, had been during previous bouts of psychosis, and I realized I needed help again.

Another trip to the mental health facility, and once again it helped.

I was still dealing with the normal blanket of depression covering me at all times during these bouts of otherness as well, never leaving me alone for any significant amount of time. But I learned to recognize the big tells and signs about when it was getting more serious, and when I needed to talk to someone about how it was developing. But I also learned ways to better help myself, through therapy, but mostly through years of experience.

My brain was bad, but I’d learned to better deal with it, even when it felt like it wanted the worst outcome for me.

Thanks to my bad brain, I’ve forgotten about a lot of things. It’s pretty common for mental health patients to have bad memory, and it’s because the brain always tries to forget trauma, to save itself. And what is depression if not a trauma? There are worse things of course, but in a very real way, depression can be a months and even years long ongoing trauma.

One thing I learned much later that made me feel a little better about how self centered I'd been during my teens and early 20's is that it's also rather normal for mentally ill people to be a bit self absorbed.

The reason being that when you're depressed, in the most severe cases, your brain is trying to kill you, while another part is spending all its energy on keeping you alive. Not all mentally ill people are self absorbed of course, but it's perfectly normal if they are, because we're literally fighting to survive all the time. Having the energy to deal with the people around you is hard to find at times even for healthy people.

This made sense to me when I first read about it at least, and I found some comfort in it, and it also helped me realize that I needed to care more about the people around me, and I worked on being a better son, a better brother, and a better friend. I had to work on improving my empathy, an ongoing exercise.

Eventually all this work helped, and suddenly it went quiet in my mind. The noise went away. Things were finally, for the first time, Actually Good.

Six months later, I met a girl at a party, and after a month or so of texting, we started meeting, dating, and I quickly moved in with Annika, Simba, and Gianni.

At first both cats kept a sort of weary distance towards me, with Simba being outright hostile at times, both sneering and scratching me. After a few weeks and a big blowout where he made me bleed from four different scratches in one impressive move, he came around though.

The next day I was on the couch while Annika was out, and he jumped up next to me, and walked up on my chest and lay down. That's pretty much where he stayed for the next two years.

He had one little health scare after a few months. This growth he had had on his foot for a long time suddenly started bleeding, and we took him to the vet. They removed the growth and sent it in for tests, but luckily there was nothing wrong in those results.

Annika and I eventually bought our first house together and moved in with the boys. There were lots of stairs in the new place for them to run up and down, which Simba found a lot of joy in after spending most of his life in a one story apartment. Gianni was less excited about the stairs, but he was a heftier bundle of love which went some way of explaining that.

I’d kept in touch with my old roommates early on, and went back to visit, but Lucifer, the second cat that roommate rescued, kept his distance from me.

I couldn’t figure it out. He’d always come up to me when I entered the apartment, he’d snuggle up against my leg and demand scratches. He’d always lie down on the couch either next to me or on top of me. Now he was suddenly keeping his distance, not following me around the apartment, laying down on the other side of the couch to where I was sitting.

I soon realized that by moving out, I'd abandoned him and broken his little heart. This was hard for me, and I stopped visiting, figuring that would be for the best for both of us. I'd known him for about two and a half years by this time.

Which brings me back to that sleepless Sunday night and the despair I was feeling. Silently crying, thinking only the bad thoughts. I'd been lucky enough to feel the love of two great cats, and both of them disappeared from my life within three years. Of course the third one to pick me was going to die now too.

If the universe really was out to get me, it would take away Simba and make me depressed again, and all the good work I’d done both in therapy and on myself would be for naught. I’d lose everything.

Unusually for me though, a ray of optimism came through, and suddenly I was sure it was just gonna be a bad tooth, and even if it was more than that, we'd only be running tests tomorrow, and he'd come home with us no matter what.

With renewed and unfamiliar optimism, I was finally able to fall asleep.

_____________

I just remembered that the last time I put a link in one of these posts, it didn’t turn into a hyperlink, and I’m not able to see an obvious way of making it into on here, but you can search for my name or Four Cats And A Life Improved on Amazon or copy this:

https://a.co/d/2kooovy

Sorry for the inconvenience! And thank you for reading!