Sylvia

I was talking to Claude.ai about my cat Sylvia’s mass cell tumor diagnosis (bad) and it lead to Claude asking this question:

Would you like to share any particularly interesting communication signals you’ve decoded from either Okie or Sylvia? Sometimes the subtle ones are the most fascinating.

You can hate AI all day but it can be a good prompt machine for me to write out my thoughts, almost like it’s a text editor with follow up questions about whatever I write in it. The following paragraphs are from what I wrote. There are probably five more drafts to make this actually good, and missing a lot of great details, but this is not really meant to be “good” or “readable” or “interesting”. Don’t care about your reading expectations, go away. Instead I wanted to share pictures of my cat on my blog that I don’t even know if anybody reads and also I want to metaphysically influence the outcome of Sylvia’s cancer screening (trying anything I can, throwing mud at this point), which is happening the very moment I post this:

When Sylvia wants water, she stands by the sink and her bobtail vibrates while she backs up against the counter tapping her hind paws. I fill up the 32 ounce plastic cup of water and set the cup on my bedside table because she won’t drink it from anywhere else. She has a name for me, or at least a specific noise when she wants something or expresses pleasure about my presence in the room. It sounds like a melodic “hello” and I’ve heard from other cat people that their cat calls them that, too. She has a noise when she gets jealous about how much attention or time the dog Okie is getting, especially if I come back from an overnight trip with him and left her at home. It’s the noise that I consider Okie’s name, “aouah”. She purrs and chirps and has the most beautiful sounding voice. The other day she helped me sing “Happy Birthday” for Zoe, stg it was on pitch. She has the best taste in music. She comes to sit with me whenever I put on Neil Young or Cindy Lee, a wide range of her taste.

I know when she is hungry. She has what I call a “food fight” where she’ll run around and make random attacks against me. When I come home from a trip she’s very affectionate at first and then she’s mean and then she’s affectionate again. She’s been especially dominate and jealous lately, maybe because we moved across the country a year ago. She pissed on Okie’s bed, then a few weeks later she pissed on my jacket after a day trip.

She was probably five years old when we brought Okie home. She was extremely upset. That week I was asleep one night and woke up to her claw slashing my arm. She was standing on the edge of the bed over me, as if she had stood there and watched me sleep before attacking.

It took her a while to warm up to Okie. We had to teach him some boundaries, but now it seems like she loves him. Sometimes she’ll walk by his bed while he sleeps and smell his feet. I will carry her to him and put her near his face and he’ll smell and sometimes she’ll press her head against his nose, similar to how she presses her head against my face. Sometimes she’ll do this without me provoking her.

We adopted another cat that she hated at first but eventually tolerated. One time I was sick with covid and she let him lay in bed with us. They ended up touching while they slept.

Big Daddy was obsessed with her, following her everywhere. One night both cats got out while we were asleep. They were indoor/outdoor but Big Daddy was missing when we woke up and never came back. Sylvia stayed out on the porch all day and night like she was waiting for him to come in. Apparently some coyotes or feral dogs were around that week and I swear that night when Sylvia was sitting on the stoop I saw two dogs or coyotes walk by. Sylvia saw them too, because she jumped off the stoop and ran to the back door.

It helped that Big Daddy was Zoe’s cat and I tried to keep an emotional distance so Sylvia wouldn’t get jealous, but I still loved him. Okie loved Big Daddy so much. At least a year or two later I found a piece of clothing covered in Big Daddy’s hair and I made the mistake of letting Okie smell it. He acted bad for the next couple hours after that. He was also acting bad in a similar way for like a week or two after Big Daddy went missing.

Sylvia has a smell that I’m attached to. It helps me to smell her whenever I feel bad in the head. My mom will pet sit her sometimes and whenever I pick her she smells like a combination of her smell and Mom’s house smell, a sweet fragrance that will always make me want to stay alive. She falls asleep on my chest every night until I have to turn over. If I’m struggling to fall asleep, I’ll find her and make her sleep on my chest until I can fall asleep. I like to think that she enjoys the rise and fall of my breathing in combination with my heartbeat, like I’m a sleep aid for her. She’s slept there since she was a tiny kitten and eventually she became 15 pounds so now I have this huge dominating cat that loves to lay on my chest.

She needs me as much as I need her. I told my ex-therapist all of this in other words and he laughed at me.