I came home after

I came home after dinner and drinks with the girls to find J completely distraught. Max was gone. Not only was he gone, but it seems he got spooked by the neighbor cat, tore across the length of the apartment and went through the front window. And by “went through” I mean crashed through a pane of glass, avoided the bars lining the window, and pummeled out into the courtyard, where he escaped down the street. As you can imagine, this was a very strange story to grapple with. I kept trying to come up with other explanations. Had someone broken the glass earlier and Max just leapt through it? Could he have bounced back and, injured, holed up somewhere in the back room? But all the glass was showered outward and we did a thorough search of the entire apartment.

Our landlords were really sweet and came out with their flashlights and helped us hint up and down the neighborhood. J and I made some crude signs and I shook a little Tupperware full of cat food to try and lure him back. It was such a shock that I was having a hard time processing all of it, but every once in a while a wave of reality would hit me and I’d think of Max in a heap by someone’s tire or huddling behind a dumpster, and it would make me well up. We plastered our block with the posters and lots of the neighbors came out to tell us they’d keep an eye out, or that they thought they saw a black cat head this way or hole up that way.

Of course I feel very guilty in the way you do when something bad happens to someone you’ve been thinking ill thoughts about. He doesn’t have a collar, though I meant to get the kitties some when we moved to a ground floor apartment. We left the window uncovered in case he wandered back home. At about 5:00 a.m. the blinds rattled and I had a fleeting thought that Max had made his way inside somehow but, of course, it was only Pinky, who slept next to me all night.

And as if all of this wasn’t as shitty as it could get, J’s bag was stolen from work yesterday evening. It was out of view in his office and he stepped out for 15 minutes to have a meeting across the hall. It was gone when he came back. Luckily he had his wallet and keys on him, but he lost his cell phone, his gym clothes, his sketch book, and his iPod. The iPod’s the real sucker punch because it was a graduation gift from me and Krista and our families and it hurts doubly to lose something with sentimental value.

I’m hoping our cosmic lesson in loss is over for now.

Also: we're putting up posters in Spanish, too. Does anyone know the correct translation/tenses for "lost cat" and "please call if found"? My 7th grade Spanish teacher would be very disappointed in me. All I can remember is "gato."