Mio the Cat: A presentation of Memories
On New Year's day 2011, my girlfriend brought home a new friend. In our cozy Mile-End apartment, he would find a home. He was grey and white, was one year old, very skinny, had a big bushy tail, and his name, as I learned, was Mio.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89161677@N08/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89161677@N08/
Mio quickly warmed up to us and showed us very quickly that he was a kind, very affable and friendly little cat. We fell in love with him instantly.
Mio loved our house and our balcony and yard, I tend to think that Montreal triplex buildings with their long narrow corridors make for the perfect cat race-track.
Anyways, About 6 months later, for reasons I'll never allow myself to understand, we packed our bags and split for the coast, where we settled in this condo in North Vancouver.
We had good views in a semi-rural neighbourhood, which I found incredibly boring and isolating, where nature's splendours were the only show in town.
And Mio loved the wild outdoors as much as he loved the urban jungle of Montreal's alleyways. He was a real outdoor's cat. He was a real explorer. An urban explorer by trade, he quickly adapted to the coast mountains topography and climate.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89161677@N08/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89161677@N08/
He would spend minutes first, then hours exploring the trails around our house. I would get baked, like totally burned and take him out on hours-long hikes. It was awesome, especially when he decided he had enough and came home to crash on my girlfriend's robe, where he also decided he would make his semi-official residence.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89161677@N08/
Apart from being a certified outdoorsman, Mio also found plenty of time to chill around the house
He also had a series of "secret" non-official residences such as this grocery bag, which he vehemently defended from a buffoonish pot-head known in some districts as rommheim.
A few days past Christmas 2012, Mio left our lives unexpectedly and we never saw him again.
This utterly devastated me, who considered him a friend, my only friend, during an already dark time in my life. But my girlfriend, who considered him almost (but not quite) like a child, suffered the most.
Bless her heart, she tried everything, Pet detectives, pet psychics (Yeah, I know), and eventually she got herself sick looking for him up to 10 hours a day.
Mio's sudden departure came at the worst time possible.
A few months later I dumped Vancouver, leaving everything and everyone behind and came back home, alone this time.
I still miss him.
This is about the last place I saw him. Before I left we buried a picture of Mio and a shitty poem I wrote near this mountain, the last place I saw him.
To this day I keep thinking about what could have happened to him. My now ex-girlfriend cannot stop herself from suspecting and imagining the worst, but I'm better geared at dealing with stuff like that, so whenever I think Mio, I think of that silly cat, that wanderer-cat, that eternal explorer of landscapes.
Mio was 2.
Prev
Linear Mode
