It only just occurred to me that one day my cat will die. 

I mean, I’ve always known cognitively that she will die. She is thirteen this year, which is crazy in itself when I think of all that’s happened in that time. Through university and my father dying and moving to 12 different houses and several jobs and now she is Andy’s too. I’ve had her since she was a tiny kitten, she is my first pet and she has been with me for my whole adult life. 

I was watching her in the yard the other day, where she sketches out her same odd little routine every morning, which must be very important, but from what I can tell only entails walking over to the flowerbed, pausing, staring, walking diagonally under the outdoor table from the same direction each time, then up three stairs to lie under the crabapple tree in the grass. 

She likes to lie on her side, and if you walk over to where she is she will turn her head upside down so it’s top-down on the grass and look at you from this strange angle, without moving her body, following your eyes with hers. She is also very talkative, many things occur to her and she enjoys trying to explain these things to us of an evening. 

I called her for dinner when she was sleeping under the tree, and it took her a long time to sit up. And when she did, she sat there, eyes closed, pretty much still asleep for about five minutes. Then she remembered what she was meant to be doing and ambled over sleepily and bunted my leg with her head on her way to her bowl. 

Some of her teeth have fallen out. When she comes to lie on you when you’re on the couch she only gets her front legs up off the floor and then stares imploringly until she is lifted the rest of the way. Sometimes we find her sleeping in weird places, like on the bathroom mat in the dark, or in the gap between a wall and behind an open door. Sometimes when you hold out treats to her in your hand she nibbles your fingers instead of eating them off your palm, which is where they are located. She finds them eventually. 

As I was looking at her sitting on the warm patio blocks in the sun, face-upturned, eyes shut catching rays, it hit me with a full and horrible force that she will not always be there. 

I think what I had thought regarding this previously, unconsciously, was that she would always be with me, and so therefore she would never die. I realise that sounds quite a ridiculous thing, but I only just now understand that she won’t. 

I went to an all girls high school. My experience of this was, figuratively, much more Friday Night Lights than it was Heathers. Next year it will have been 20 years since we started seventh grade. 20 years! My God, we’re so old. We’re still friends. 

In that time a few of our parents have died and we’ve buried them. People have had babies. Some of them are married - or about to be - to the boy they met in high school, one of them from the boy’s school across the way. Does this all sound like a nightmare to you? I thought it might once for me also, but that couldn’t be farther from true.  

Lately I have occasion to look back on this time and realise as an adult the full measure of how lucky I was/am. 

We were taught in a school of girls by a staff of almost exclusively women, many of whom had grown up during the first wave of feminism and so it was taught to us, from the moment we could be cogent of ourselves as a body of women, that we should never undermine each other. That just wasn’t done, and so we didn’t. Fourteen years in the real world has taught me that this was the exception, not the rule. 

It was where we learned early on that for everyone to do well was best for all of us, collectively. The marks were scaled for your final exams, across the state, so the better everyone did as a whole, the better the marks were for each person (that these marks probably mattered much less in the scheme of things than you were lead to believe as an anxious teenager is by the by.) 

One of the few male teachers we had, when he wasn’t showing us intense documentaries from the ’70s (and planting nascent ideas in some of us about some day becoming journalists), he was very fond of telling us at any opportunity that advertising, and the beauty industry in particular, was bullshit. 

“All this is doing, girls, is making you feel insecure for no reason so you will spend money,” he’d say. “Which is absolute rubbish. You have brains, and that’s what counts in the world.” Other things he was fond of imparting included a virulent resistance to censorship (“There is no single idea in the world, in itself, that can hurt you,”) and to remind us, often, to always earn our own money from as early as possible.   

So to people who are fond of saying “Those who don’t do, teach”, I say, verily: Fuck you. These experiences turned me into who I am much more than my parents did, as they were incapable of giving me what I needed (for their own complex reasons) in order to become what I like to think of as a good person.

But my friends always did, and I will go to my grave knowing these people, and so, how lucky I am to have met them.

I caught a cab to Creswick last year to attend the gemstone collectors’ get-together, where I came away with scant knowledge, but some rocks in the shape of perfect cubes. They come that way out of the Earth. They are either native to the area they are mined in, or from a meteorite, no one knows for sure. So I bought two for five dollars and have kept them with me ever since, and honestly, they have been quite luck bringing. 

It’s a 20 minute ride or so, and the driver started telling me about the town, how it floods every other year, and how it’s built on a giant bluestone deposit. Then he told me about how he had been in a horrific motorcycle accident several years earlier, and he’d only lived because a man had saved his life.

He went over the front of the bike outside of a factory and broke almost every bone in his body, except for his skull. His vertebrae were cracked, but there was no damage to his spinal cord. He didn’t remember any of it, until he woke up in the psychiatric ward of the hospital three days later. 

When he woke, he asked where he was, and learning it was the psych ward, asked the doctor why he was there.

“Because you told us you were saved by a man from Mars.” 

“I was.” 

“Yes, that’s why you’re here.” 

“Wait. Not the planet, the factory. The Mars Bar factory.” 

A man in the factory had seen the accident happen in front of him while he stood outside on his lunch break and ran to pull the bike off the rider. 

The cab driver said he would have loved to have kept riding after he’d recovered but his wife said she’d divorce him. 

Anyway, that same Mars factory here is soon going to produce 4.7 billion Maltesers every year.