Love Saves the Day

Sarah and I have been roommates for three years, one month, and sixteen days. I would tell you how many hours and seconds we’ve been together, but cats don’t use hours and seconds. We know that’s something humans made up. Cats have an instinct that tells us exactly when the right time for everything is. Humans never know when they’re supposed to do anything, so they need things like clocks and timers to tell them. Twice a year, Sarah sets all the clocks in our apartment forward one hour or back one hour, and that just proves how made-up hours are. Because it’s not like you can tell everybody to move the world one whole day back or one whole year ahead and have it be true.

You might think Sarah and I are a family because we live together, but not everybody who lives together is a family. Sometimes they’re roommates. The difference is that, in a family, everybody does things together, and they do those things at the same time every day. They all eat breakfast with each other, and breakfast is always at the same time in the morning. Then they have dinner together, and that always happens at the same time, too. They take each other to school or work and then pick each other up from those places a few hours later, and both the picking-up and the dropping-off happen on a schedule. I learned all about it from the TV shows Sarah and I watch together. Even the TV shows about families always come on at the same time, every day.

(I used to think that the things on TV were really happening, right here in our apartment. Once I tried to catch a mouse that was on the TV screen. I clawed and clawed at the glass and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get the mouse. And Sarah laughed and explained that TV is like a window, except it shows you things that are happening far away.)

With roommates, it’s more like you have separate lives even though you live in the same place. Things happen when they happen and not at any specific time. Also, families live in houses with an upstairs and a downstairs. Roommates live in apartments. Sarah and I live in an apartment, and our schedule is always different. Sarah says this is because they always change the times she’s supposed to work. She types things for a big office in a place called Midtown, and she’s so good at typing that sometimes they need her to type early in the morning, and sometimes they need her to type later in the day. Sometimes they pay her a lot of extra money to type all night and not come home until after the sun comes up, which is when most other humans are first starting to work.

Money is what Sarah uses to get food for me and to keep our apartment. She always says you have to get it when you can get it, even if you wish you didn’t have to. I know just what she means, because sometimes a cat has to chase her food when it runs by, even if she’s in the middle of a really great nap. Who knows when the next time food runs by will be? That’s why smart cats spend most of their time napping—to save their energy for when they suddenly need it.

But even on the days she doesn’t work, Sarah doesn’t do things on anything like a regular schedule. Sometimes I have to meow in my saddest voice and paw at her leg to remind her it’s time to feed me. I feel bad when I have to do that, because I can tell from her face how unhappy it makes her when she forgets to do things for me. But she usually laughs a little in the way that humans do when they’re trying to make something sad into something funny, and says she supposes the reason she’s so forgetful is because she has an artistic temperament, even though it’s been years since she’s done anything creative.

I’m not sure what a “temperament” is. Maybe it’s something an artist makes. Or maybe it’s something an artist uses to make something else. Whatever it is, though, I’ve never seen anything like that around here.

You might think from all this that I’m complaining about living with Sarah, but that’s not true. Living with Sarah is actually pretty great. For one thing, she’s always willing to share her food with me. When she sits down to eat, she usually puts some of her food on a little plate off to the side, and I sit on the table and eat with her. Although sometimes Sarah eats things that are just plain gross. There’s one kind of food, called “cookies,” that Sarah especially loves even though they don’t have any meat or grass or anything in them. Sarah laughs when I turn up my nose in disgust and says I don’t know what I’m missing. I think Sarah’s the one who doesn’t know what’s supposed to be eaten and what isn’t.