Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

IN THE EVENINGS, I pulled out a leash for Bubba so we could walk outside in the buzzing summer night.
The cat had been sick for a while. He was 15 years old. I didn’t know how much longer he had, and if
I wasn’t careful, I could spend a whole day freaking out about this.
When I met Bubba, he was an outdoor cat. But one day he came back to my ex-boyfriend’s
apartment with incisor bites in the side of his cheek, like two toothpicks through raw dough. There
was a series of expensive surgeries. A long stretch of recovery time. He became an indoor cat after
that.
It was a miserable power struggle to break him. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to win an
argument with a cat, but good luck with that. He would slip out when we weren’t looking, settle
scores in some back alley near midnight, and return two days later like Don Draper crashing through
the front door after a bender. What? What are you looking at?
I loved him for all of this. I, too, was drawn to places that would destroy me. I, too, came home
with bruises, and it never stopped me. The cat was an appealing mix of strapping adventurer and
cuddle bug. People say cats are aloof, but they are just very, very discerning about whom they trust. I
liked caring for that cranky little guy. Women can be very good at ladling their love into the unsmiling
mouth of a creature who nonetheless needs them.
I come from a long line of nurses on both sides of my family. We give gentle strokes and change
bedpans and wipe up vomit splashed on the floor while cracking vaguely inappropriate jokes. When I
think about my own failure to take care of myself, I wonder sometimes if I wasn’t unconsciously
waiting for someone like me to come along. Pay off my credit cards, clean up my oopsies. Other
people’s messes can be so much more interesting than our own.
Maybe that’s why I needed the cat so much. This may sound absurd, but cats are caretakers. They
will kill your mice and curl up at your side when you’re ill. One night in Brooklyn, I became fluish
and had to lie on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with my pillow and a duvet. It was one of those
moments when my loneliness ached like a broken bone. And the cat padded into the bathroom and lay
down beside me, and we slept like this, both of us curled against the warm side of the other.
Now it was my turn to take care of him. The sickness required pills, popped into his mouth twice a
day. X-rays, constant experimentation with his food. Jennifer was a veterinarian now; the child who
once saved wounded birds had grown up to be a woman who saved people’s pets. When Bubba got
sick, she was the person we both needed.
My new house was mere blocks from where Bubba had once prowled, and when he started
meowing at the door again—after years of remaining silent on the issue—I wanted to do something
for him. Let him roam his home turf again, before he died. I wanted to find some compromise where
he could venture into the lusty outdoors that called to him—but stay tethered to me.
The leash was my big idea. Jennifer swore up and down it wouldn’t work. Leashes were against a
cat’s nature, she insisted, and for a long time, she was right. Then one day, I put on his harness—blue
vinyl ropes along his haunches, like he was about to jump out of an airplane—and he discovered this
simple act of surrender led to the outside world.
He inched through the doorway with his nose twitching. When his paws touched the familiar dirt,
his whole body went electric. This. All of this. The breeze in his fur. Those feral smells. A blade of
grass dragged along the side of his mouth. He rolled around in the dirt. He sniffed the grille of my car
like it contained all the decadence of the world.