we're all getting older.

I got Holly when I was 23. I'm 36 now, and I'm so grateful we still have time.

Holly used up three of her nine lives this year. Maybe four.

It started when I woke up one morning and she didn’t come running for her breakfast. The vet is around the corner, and I distinctly remember thinking, I’ll take her in and spend 100 dollars for them to tell me I’m paranoid. I’ve spent more money on stupider things. But she had a fever, and a high white blood cell count, and that turned into antibiotics which she hated and made her incredibly high, and that turned into messes around the litter box and all over the apartment and still no improvement, and none of this gave us any answers. She had fluid in her stomach but the scans didn’t show any signs of cancer and the tests didn’t point to any other organs failing. I slept on the couch with her some nights, my boyfriend slept on the couch one night when she was curled up next to me in bed and he didn’t want to move her. I was irritable, I was worried, I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything because I wanted to be with her. Because I feared the worst and was so scared, I refused to say it out loud. Three weeks after all of this began, we rushed her to an animal hospital in Yonkers because the ones in Manhattan were full and did we want to try going to Stamford, the emergency vet asked. Because she had a fever. Still. After all that time.

We took her there on a Sunday. I took off work on Monday and cried and cried and cried. I went for a run that night to try to distract myself, and when DMX came on my playlist, I got so incredibly sad because, you know, the Yonkers of it all. On Tuesday, we had a likely answer (FIP, the details of which I’ll spare you). We took her home and I slept on the couch with her again. And on Thursday, we started her on a specially-compounded medication, one she’ll need to take twice a day, every day, for at least twelve weeks or until after another round of tests finally comes back clear.

I got Holly when I was 23. I tell the story the same way, that my roommate at the time got a cat right when we moved into our apartment and I decided, well, I want one, too. She was probably still too young to be separated from her mother when I picked her up from the foster family, but Hurricane Sandy had come and gone and the entire city was piecing itself back together. We’ve had each other through everything that has happened since — including the years I worked for so many hours that I was rarely home and worried she hated me for it, the year I packed her up and went home to Los Angeles, the years everything shut down and I was suddenly home all the time, and the past year in which we’ve settled into a much nicer apartment, one where there aren’t any bugs for her to chase (I hope).

I’ve grown up in that time. She has, too. She has white whiskers in place of black ones and I have plans for the future that reach far beyond me, that focus on we and all those sentimental things. I’ve published a book, I’ve written several other manuscripts, and this whole time, she curled up right next to me, sleeping while I wrote. The vets have been referring to her check-ups as “senior screens” for a few years now, and every time, I pause because that can’t possibly be right, and I refuse to accept that it is.

There are so many heartbreaks you are told to brace for as you grow older. The dream jobs that you lose or that become nightmares from under you, the breakups (obviously), the friends you drift away from. Hannah Baxter in a recent newsletter pointed out that the pets you adopt in your early 20s become part of that equation too, particularly as you reach your mid-30s. Holly has never really been sick — the worst scare she’s ever given me is when she hated some fancy new litter so much she refused to go to the bathroom, which resulted in the vet charging me $600 to say she was both constipated and stubborn — so the past two and a half months of trying to figure out what was wrong on her behalf, of feeling like we were treating her like a science experiment to see which antibiotic might work, of one vet condescendingly defining the term “empirically” to me, has been a new and terrifying concept.

(Also, expensive. Every time I tell someone how much, they repeat the number back to me, stupefied.)

But those two and a half months have passed, just as the past 14 years we’ve had each other have done, too. I log into Facebook accidentally, or because I need to sync my account to log into something else, and I see that the girls I went to high school with are now women, are now getting married and having kids or managing a divorce or having their second set of kids from their second marriage. My brother has kids, my sister is fighting the same expectations I am of if and when. I try not to think about my 401(k) too much, I do try to remember both my retinol and my sunscreen. I am shocked every day that I am an adult, but I like to think I’m capable, that I’m figuring it out as I go.

They don’t tell you when you adopt a 7-week-old kitten that one day you’ll have to say goodbye. I’m sure it’s implied, in one way or another, but it’s not something you’d want to think about in the beginning (even I’m not that fatalistic). And sure, eventually, it will happen. I know that, logically, but that doesn’t mean I’m any more ready for it. That doesn’t mean I won’t fight for her then, like I’ve been fighting for her now.

She’s doing better. She struggles and protests every time I wrap her in a beach towel to take her medicine, which the vet says is a good thing, and she surprises me when she chooses to play with one of her toys. She’s regained two pounds, but her hair has yet to grow back in and I keep whispering “boots with the fur” when I look at the bald patches where the catheters were on her front paws. Olive, our other cat, keeps giving Holly a wide berth but swooping in to finish her food whenever she gets a chance. Some days, it seems like she slips, that she’s lethargic or hiding or not eating as much, and I have to remember that she’s still technically sick, that her body is still fighting and will be for at least a few more months.

But I am grateful Holly’s responding, that there’s even a treatment for this virus now. That I had the savings on hand to dedicate to her care, and that I was stubborn enough to know that something was still wrong, week after week, no matter how many of the vets she saw shrugged and contradicted each other. I’m in a different place in my life than I was when I adopted her, but I still feel like the same girl I was in a lot of ways. I certainly don’t feel older than I was then, and I still need the cat that curled up next to me back then, thrilled that I was her human. The one who is curled up next to me, right now as I type this.

She still has me, and I have her. And at least for now, we don’t have to say goodbye.