#8 Saying goodbye to two sweet kitties

In October my friends began their move to Dubai in a rush to meet the deadline of a job offer. They're planning to take their cats over with them, but requiring various paper work like rabies certificates which need time to process, the cats needed a short-term place to stay. I was delighted.

I love having cats around, yet my life has felt too unstable for the last few years to find myself a kitten to form a long-term bond with. I always feel like I'm on the brink of moving overseas, and I've lived in a different house roughly every two years. I know one day my time will come, and I'm patiently waiting for that while trying to make the most of this fluid state.

Unfortunately with me moving out of home last month, that meant leaving the cats to my boyfriend. And while I think there's a big part of him that's taken by them and their cute paws of attention and headbuts, the added responsibility during an extremely stressful time was taking it's toll and I was hearing every time he had to clear up the furrball vomit on the bed the day after we had a cleaner in.

Fortunately my friend's parents are now living close-by, in the same apartment the friends had lived in since the cats were born, and so they offered to take them for the last month until they could set out on their overseas adventure. So yesterday I took them across, via the vet for their 3-in-1 inoculation that had somehow been missed when they went in for the rabies one last year.

I wish it could all have been a simple task with the focus simply on the grief of saying farewell to them. But of course, with everything else going on there was far more stress involved. With our owners now hoping to sell the apartment, they've appointed some contractors to fix the windows and they arrived in the morning. The cats are quite skittish and they quickly dashed to behind the bath, which meant that I had trouble getting them out in time for the vet appointment. I called to say I was delayed, and they suggested rescheduling the whole thing to the afternoon. I was overwhelmed and a bit shaken, so I called my boyfriend to come help me in the afternoon.

Funny how when you're stressed, your resilience to handle something relatively straightforward goes out the door and you end up an emotional wreck on the bathroom floor. Also, I wonder if I'll ever be able to ask for help with something before I get to that stage? I'm working on it.