I also realize that my bond with my cat, 13-year-old pale red Bremton, has become too close since the corona crisis. We used to see each other for about eight hours a day, which was already a lot, but that turned into 16 hours a day, and he now thinks I’m his heated seat. Or actually he thinks, I think, that we are one organism that breathes and purrs together, and I think the same.
When I sit on the couch at night, if he doesn’t come right away, I feel a Bremton-shaped absence on my lap. It’s simultaneously an old-fashioned electric blanket and one of those modern heavy blankets that everyone’s been talking about lately. “You should buy a heavy blanket so you can sleep better.” “I already have an overweight cat.”
He has to sit on your lap, he knows that, and here he comes, jumps on it, does the silly circles that cats have to run before they can get their rest and falls asleep. Because he can get some rest. In fact, he has been taking his rest all his life, and that has been happening to me full-time for two years now.
I was in a bookstore this week and noticed that the cat book boom isn’t over yet. Live like a cat, think like a cat, what your cat really thinks, work like a cat, the cat who went on a trip, the girl and the cat, the general and the cat and all cats have autism.
Completely unnecessary books, if you ask me, because I can’t and don’t want to live like my cat: I would never get anything out of my hands and I would get very fat.
But I can live very well with my cat, and what all those books tell you – that a cat lives ‘in the moment’ (read: always sleeps and very sometimes very focused on a pigeon on the balcony) – that range you with a cat on your lap.
Actually, and this Bremton knows, the best time to jump on my lap is when my phone is just too far away from me. I can’t take it anymore, because I treat my cat like a precarious, fat prince; when he’s on top of me, I don’t move, even if I have to go to the bathroom or want to make tea. His rest takes precedence over everything.
So the phone is out of reach, Bremton is on my lap, I can’t read anything, no news, can’t scroll through Instagram. I don’t live like a cat, I live like a woman who puts her cat on a pedestal, and that’s really the best way to live.