August 17th, 2014 - Cass Donish

Ten years ago. Her green eyes. My sister Robin and I stood in a big-box store parking lot, limbs sticky with humidity, looking down. Avocado eyes, emerald eyes, two clear lakes, bright jade, sugar snap pea. We'd heard her meow, then saw her running between parked cars, straight toward me. At my feet, she sat, stared up. She had no collar. Her eyes were urgent: "So—let's go home already."

*

I had lived with other cats before—the cats of housemates, friends. And there had been the childhood cat, the one who never came back after my dad left and my sisters went away to college. I was five, or six. My mom and I eventually moved into the cramped apartment of her new partner, in a different part of Los Angeles, and I never saw that cat again, the orange cat, the tomcat, who I called Watermelon, Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich, Tiger, O'Brien. 

*

A couple standing nearby watched us. "Are you gonna...?" they asked, seeming ready to step forward. But it was clear this cat had chosen me, that the decision was now mine.

Yes, the decision was made. I was gonna. 

*

After spending most of my life on the West Coast—college and post-college life in Seattle, a few years in Eugene—I had arrived in St. Louis two days earlier. I was starting an MFA program. In September, I’d turn 32.

Robin had driven out with me from Oregon, and as we drove east, through dry desert, over rust-colored mountains, across flat plains, our talk kept returning to baby names. Robin wanted a baby. In Eugene, there was a little street I always liked the name of. "What about Oakleigh?" I said, remembering the street sign, how I liked the way the word looked. "With L-E-I-G-H at the end, to make it fancy?" I said. 

"Nah," Robin said. "You can keep that one for yourself."

*

We listened to the news on the car radio. We heard that Robin Williams had died by suicide. And we learned that Michael Brown, a Black teenager who had graduated from high school a week earlier, was shot and killed in the street by a white police officer.

The protests in Ferguson had started, and we were driving toward them.

*

We brought the cat to my new one-bedroom apartment next to the Missouri Botanical Garden, near Tower Grove Park and World's Fair Donuts. Maidenhair trees lined the block; in the fall, as waves of protests rose again after the news broke that Michael Brown’s killer wasn’t indicted, the leaves would turn brilliant yellow, cover the sidewalk with fan silhouettes.

*

A long-haired cat, she was five or six months old, with a coat that vets call "dilute calico": gray, pale orange, and white. Long hairs stuck out from her ears like a little wizard. Long fur stuck out from her paws.

An indecisive libra, I can be terrible about such things, but in this case, there was no deliberation. "Her name is Oakleigh," I said.

Four years later, Robin had a baby, and named her Wren.

*

That first fall, Oakleigh was there when I came home from the protests on Grand Ave, after some of the protesters blocked the freeway with their bodies, after some of my friends were pepper-sprayed, kettled in a coffee shop, arrested.

She was there as I embraced a Jewishness I’d felt alienated from, because I hadn’t grown up with the religious tradition, but also because it was patrilineal and people had always told me this made me “not Jewish.” She was there when I went through a breakup, when I fell hard in love with Kelly, when I came out as queer and then nonbinary, when Kelly came out as trans, when my first books were published. She was there through Kelly’s bipolar disorder, then through Kelly’s death in 2020 just as winter ended, just as Covid hit.

I’ve lived with Oakleigh in two St. Louis apartments and two houses in Columbia, Missouri. A fierce and fragile creature, she’s protective of me—as long as I don't ask her to be; she is, after all, a cat.

*

I know I sometimes project my emotions onto her. “Oakleigh is feeling anxious,” I’ll say, watching her closely, worried. “She seems unsettled.” “She wants to go outside.” “I think she’s bored.” “She needs space.”

“Oakleigh really doesn’t seem okay.”

“Oakleigh isn’t eating.”

“Oakleigh is depressed.”

*

Oakleigh has always been interested in people; she loves sitting around while everyone is talking. But she doesn’t like to be touched unless she already knows someone well. This is an unfortunate combination in a cat. She approaches people delicately, sniffs a hand adorably, but then she screams—a surprisingly loud, prolonged meow—if someone tries to pet her. “Don’t make eye contact,” I say. “Just look away.”

She doesn’t like being alone, but she needs people to respect her boundaries.

*

During some stretches—a few hours, a few days—when Kelly had symptoms of mania or agitated depression, I have no memory of Oakleigh. I don’t remember where she was, how she seemed.

I was alert to Kelly’s state, vigilant to the point of not noticing my own body’s needs. Sometimes, at those times, I became invisible to myself. Where was I? How did I seem?

*

I have no memory of Oakleigh the night Kelly died. But she was with me constantly in the first year of widowhood, of grief, sitting on my legs every night, purring.

*

When I moved to St. Louis, I wasn’t planning to get a cat, even though I was going to be living alone for the first time in my life, even though I’ve always absolutely loved cats. My early experiences with attachment to animals—the loss of them within the broader breakup of my family—meant that I had subconsciously maintained a level of detachment.

After I’d been living with Oakleigh for a while, I considered getting another cat. Kelly was against it. Less than six months after Kelly died, I got a gray kitten with gold eyes.

*

Ryan had one cat when we met, a sassy tortie, and I had two, and when we moved in together we had a three-cat household.

Recently, we got a fourth cat—little dream, color of a roasted marshmallow—and we got married.

*

This week, on Instagram, I see pictures of Michael Brown, the Ferguson protests, the signs people carried back then: “From Ferguson to Palestine, Occupation Is a Crime.”

For almost a year, Ryan and I have been going to weekly marches protesting the Gaza genocide. We follow Isleen’s chant: DOWN DOWN WITH THE OCCUPATION, UP UP WITH LIBERATION. When we get home, we cuddle cats. They don’t know about militarized violence, systemic racism, resource extraction, anti-trans legislation, suicide, attacks on reproductive rights, detention centers, cop cities.

They want to play. They want affection, and treats. They remind us to be in our bodies, and in this way, I think they help us survive.

*

Oakleigh is ten now, the oldest of the four cats. My princess, my sweet grump, my queen, my artichoke, my Oak-smoke, my little diva in white gloves. Oakleigh Cat. My green-eyed Missouri girl.

---

Queer poet and writer Cass Donish is the author of the poetry collections Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024); The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was selected for publication by Maggie Nelson. Donish lives and writes on the unceded ancestral lands of the Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria, Očeti Šakowin (Sioux), Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, Illini-Peoria, and other Indigenous peoples who were unjustly and forcibly displaced, in a place also known as Columbia, Missouri.