I’ll spend the rest of my life grateful for the small striped cat who will always be my best girl. I’ll spend the rest of my life missing her, too, and hoping if such a reunion is possible that she’s waiting for me when I get there.

There's something very socially damning about being a single woman with a cat. I'm not sure why this is. Other than the stereotypical Cat Lady image that has proliferated from the one woman we all know whose house is overrun with them, stinky, hairy, and with a shocking lack of separation between human spaces, dishes, and food and cat spaces, dishes, and food. This lady will inevitably be single, (because who would really want to get with that?) and so there you have it. The Single Woman with a Cat Stereotype Inevitability.

How do you know if you are one? If it's loving cats, then I'm definitely a cat lady. If it's owning a cat, again, guilty.

I probably should have been thinking last night about freedom and independence and bombs bursting in air, but mostly I was thinking about my childhood dog, Jazz, (named after the star jasmine flower) and how she used to run and hide in the backyard shed at the first sign of fireworks.