E. and I are contemplating a kitty.

“Just think of it,” he said over breakfast the other morning, topping off my coffee.  “Its little head!  Its little paws!  The little top hat and monocle we’ll staple on it when we take it to the opera!”

And it’s true, a little muscular warm furry being at the end of our bed, warming our toes, sounds pretty great.  And given the myriad personalities we’ve bestowed upon our stuffed animals, it might be nice to actually have something alive at the end of the day, actually doing those cute things.  We throw our little bear Skidoo across the room and pretend he’s flying; we bring him on vacations and say he’s an explorer.  A cat would be like Skidoo, I reasoned, just taken to the next level.  At least that’s what I told my mom when I called her and broke the news, hoping for, as she is the most frequent user of our guest room, a blessing.  She told me it might be time for kids.

***

SHE’S NOT ENTIRELY wrong, breathless as it makes me to say.  E. and I have an awful lot of love to share.  It’s hard to have the pet conversation without tapping into the deeper, less furry (but indeed no less hairy, OHO!), conversations that it implies.  A cat, I’ve been told, is a fairly low maintenance affair, but can still be a ten to fifteen to even twenty year commitment.  Caught up as I am by the idea of the minor inconveniences of vacuuming more and scooping kitty litter, it’s been shockingly easy to dismiss that kind of longevity.  Who knows who I’ll be – who we’ll be – in a decade?  Who I could have brought into the world, who I love who may have left it, where I’ll live, what work I’ll do.  Wrapping my mind around even a five-year plan right now feels like staring into some precious, infinite black hole.  I savor not knowing.  And yet, here we are, willing to promise ourselves to something that we haven’t even promised to each other.  We email each other Youtube videos of tottering, sedated kitties, and wee kitties climbing up their owners as soon as the can opener comes out of the drawer, and kitties doing push-ups, all the while willfully oblivious to how big this idea really is.

But it’s not just because kitties are just so goddamn cute (although it helps, and they are).  It’s because, quite frankly, we’ve been ready for this kind of commitment since the day we co-signed our lease.  The kind of trust we need to do this, and do this right, has been humming along so steadily, so easily, that it rather unremarkably transforms that gaping abyss into innocuous, bite-sized logistics.  Our big plans include vacuuming regularly, brushing weekly, keeping our home welcoming to allergy-sufferers, and recording every inch of a kitten whose biggest struggle in life will be to keep his fluffy, oversize little head upright.

We are overripe fruit, E. and I.  No one plucks us before we’re ready; we fall heavily to the soft earth when we decide it’s time.  And not to brag, but it makes us really, really good together.  E. always stops to kneel down and stroke any cat he comes across, to offer his fingers and make it feel safe, the same way my two-year-old niece will sidle up to him and offer her little fingers into his.  My heart trills watching both.

***

“WE NEED A good name,” I said.  “That’s the first priority.”

This suggestion led, of course, to a long and meandering conversation that started promising (“Henri!  Igor!  Ira!  Miles!  Charlie Parker!”) and, after exhausting all of our mutual interests, favorite foods, and shared history, subsequently devolved into just pointing out random objects around our kitchen.  (“I dunno, Teapot?  Dishwasher?  I have to go to work.”)  We’ve learned that there are no cute names that come from meeting your partner from working together at Starbucks, and, unfortunately, a good friend has already named her cat Sashimi.   And we’ve also learned, maybe in a way we’ve never quite articulated before, how deeply alike we are.  We would consider naming a cat after our weekly sushi order, or after a Modernist European composer, and be equally charmed.  We could take on an idea so big, so abstract, so impossible in its possibilities, and hold it, softly purring, in the palm of our hand.