I Miss You, Buddy

Jun 26, 2025

Yesterday I wrote about Stray. Today, I finished it. And the final line of dialogue got me, hard.

He was.

I got him when I was 21, and he was 9 months. A friend of mine got stuck with him when his girlfriend dumped him, and my friend was growing increasing annoyed at him. Specifically, how vocal he was. He was the loudest and most talkative cat I’ve ever met. So much so that, to this day, I still sleep with earplugs, just because if I didn’t, he’d wake me up screaming for food at 5am.

I love cats. I had cats as a kid. But he was the first time I was fully responsible for a living thing. It was tough at first. He had a swagger, an air of “this is my place, I’ll do what I want”. He would knock down absolutely everything on every shelf, but only when I was watching him. Because he wanted me to know it was him. He would sleep all day and then, when I went to bed, that’s when he decided to go insane. Didn’t matter if I went to bed at 8pm or 3am, as soon as I got into bed, he’s running around, jumping on everything, knocking everything over. I eventually got him to stop by using his favourite thing against him: food. I would grab a handful of cat treats and hold them tight in a fist as I fell asleep. He would try to shove his nose into my hand and release the treasure inside but, the only way my hand would relax is if I fell asleep. He eventually learned.

I brought him with me from Canada, when I moved. When I moved, I didn’t really understand the full implications of moving to another country, where I knew almost nobody. My first week in San Francisco was difficult, to put it mildly. My old cat got me through it.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find housing. I got two weeks in an AirBnB, figuring two weeks is plenty to find a place to live. It was not. I got another AirBnB for two weeks and through sheer luck, found an apartment on the last day of my AirBnB. I wouldn’t have had a place to live if that luck hadn’t come through; there was some kind of event happening in the city and all of the places were booked up.

So you can imagine how panicked it made me when, a few days after signing the lease, I got a threatening letter from the landlord, informing me that I was not allowed to have a cat in the unit, and I would be evicted in three days if I didn’t put him down.1

After a full on panic attack, I frantically checked the lease I had just signed, to find the pet addendum that I has signed (and the $500 pet deposit I had paid). I called them sobbing, asking why they were fucking with me like this. The receptionist just laughed and said “oops, our bad”.

I’d wish that landlord a slow and painful death, but he was already like 70 back then so he’s probably already kicked the bucket a while ago. That receptionist can get raped and die of AIDS, though. “Lol oops we almost made you homeless, alone in a foreign country, teehee nobody’s perfect” get fucked, bitch.

A few years later, my first girlfriend moved in with me. She had a dog. Border Collie/Aussie mix. I had no idea how my cat would take it. It was tense, at first. They kept their separate space. Her dog would try to play with my cat, and my cat would swat him on the nose, and they’d keep their distance. But about six months after she moved in, I come home one day to see the cat and the dog through the window, snuggling together on the couch. As soon as I opened the door, the both bolted in opposite directions. “He can never know, we have to keep up appearances. Cats and dogs cannot be friends”. But they were.

My next apartment came with a roommate, and she came with her own cat. She warned me that he was a street cat rescue, and could be quite mean. We’ll have to be careful, watch them closely, make sure her cat didn’t attack mine. I can happily report that every time her cat attacked mine, it was in self defense. Her “mean street cat” immediately got put in his place by my cat, who was a giant asshole to him for no reason. I never caught them snuggling, but I did catch them both curled up on my roommate’s bed one day, peacefully sitting a few feet apart.

This is also when he went from “big boi” to “OH LAWD HE COMIN”. He was always a fat cat, but see above re: screaming and take a guess how trying to put him on a diet went. That apartment was in a relatively residential part of town, and so I thought I could let him outside. Running around and getting exercise would help him burn off the calories. So you can imagine my surprise when this just made him fatter. After a year of this, one night as my roommmate is outside calling the cats in for the night, she mentions in passing that the neighbours wanted me to know they love my cat.

“What do you mean they love my cat?”

“Oh, wait, did you not know? He’s basically king of the block. He goes and visits all of the neighbours every night, they each have their own name for him. Really, you never knew?”

That fucker was getting 5 dinners a night.

He came with me to Texas. He was there for me when everything collapsed in 2019. During covid, for almost six months, he was the only ‘person’ I verbally spoke to. He bravely defended my dumpster from a raccoon once, and almost died from it, but after the vet tended to his wounds, he made a full recovery very quickly. He was 30 lbs, but, to quote my vet, “surprisingly healthy given his weight”.

His life began to end when I was in exile, two years ago, dealing with the same visa situation I had now. I left him behind with a new girlfriend to watch over him. It turned out that that girl should not have been trusted. I can’t prove it, and I know how insane it sounds, but I believe she poisoned him. She openly hated him, constantly talked shit about him. I gave her leeway because she was allergic, and I’d probably get very frustrated with cats if they made me feel sick, too. But she would frequently talk about “what we will do once he’s gone”, which I thought was odd given that he was only 13. Not young, but cats can easily make it to 18, especially when they’re quote “surprisingly healthy” like he was.

When I got back to the states, I noticed that he was losing weight. At first this seemed like a good thing. But he started to look a little thin and lethargic, and so I got him a vet checkup, only three months after he got a clean bill of health at his last one. He had lost 15 lbs in 3 months. Half his body weight, in three months. To put this in perspective, my new cat only weighs 11 lbs.

The vet comes for another checkup and she’s like “you know, he actually seems pretty fine, but he’s definitely not fine if he’s lost that much weight so quickly. We need to do some tests”. When she took an extra two days to give me the final test results, I knew they wouldn’t be good.

I guess she couldn’t figure out how to sugarcoat it, so instead she just sent me the direct medical notes. I sent them to both my dad, and another doctor friend, for translation. Both of them said the same thing, though it turns out my dad’s bedside manner is a lot better than my friend’s: “If a person presented with cancer this bad, I’d euthanize the person out of mercy”. Stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer.

He was the very best cat I could have asked for. He had stage four cancer, and aside from the weight loss, and not having quite as much energy as he used to, he seemed fine. That’s how tough that little fatass was. But in the days leading up to putting him down, it was clear that he knew the end was near. The last night before the vet came, he looked like he would just keel over at any moment. I’m so glad he didn’t because, still unemployed, future in America in peril, and with my latest relationship fallen apart in dramatic fashion, I would have joined him if that had happened.

But he held on until the next morning. When he stopped breathing in my arms, I could see it in his eyes that he had been hiding the pain of his cancer, and the pain had finally gone. My best friend had lived a long, full life, and he did more for me than his little cat brain could ever understand.

I have a new cat now. He’s pretty cool, but, he’s not my old cat. No cat could ever be. My old cat was there with me for almost every important moment. Just the two of us on a grand adventure through life, brimming with possibility.

My new cat, he just gets to watch as everything collapses, the world takes away everything I’ve made for myself, and we start the long march downhill.

A long time ago, I worked at a company that published photo albums, and one of the perks was that I got make free ones. So naturally, I made one of my old cat. It sits on the shelf by my door now, along with a tuft of his fur and a clay imprint of his paw they made before cremation. It is the first thing I see when I get home and put my keys and wallet in the basket beside the book. It is my tribute to my friend, the very best I could have asked for, and at this point, it’s one of the only things that keeps me going.

I miss you, buddy. No person has ever wanted to share the small moments of life with me, and probably no person ever will. But you shared all of them. RIP in peace

I was too naieve and ignorant at the time to realize just how empty of a threat this was. It’s basically impossible to evict someone in San Francisco. Right now, if you want to evict someone, even if you have one of the very narrow justified causes for it, it will take at minimum six months, you have to appear in eviction court with them and the city pays for their lawyer, and if you’re successful, you have to give them two years worth of the difference between their rent-controlled rate and market rate, which typically works out to $30,000-$50,000. The idea that anyone would get evicted in three days in San Francisco is laughable in hindsight

I’ve shared the story before, but a friend of mine had a roommate who got arrested in their house twice for selling cocaine from it, didn’t pay rent for a year, and pulled a knife on the master tenant and threatened to kill him in his sleep if he asked for back rent again. All of this was not even grounds to evict him. So, “having a cat after signing a document where we gave you permission to have a cat” wouldn’t go anywhere in that communist shithole.