Personal Essay: Lost - Tall Black Cat by George Leipold

By George Leipold

I lost my job on a cold January day. I went to work. I was called into a meeting. Just me and the owner.

“This may come as a shock to you, but this is the last day of Roxberry Juice.”

He said it with a finality that rang in my ears like a church bell calling its followers into service. This is your last day. Two years of my life just slipped down the drain of a three chamber metal restaurant sink in a singular sentence.

Another casualty of the pandemic. ​

The rest of the day went by in a blur. Make calls. Tell employees they no longer have a job. Be met with comforts about unemployment checks. Receive suggestions for alternate places of employment. Go home, drinking a smoothie on the way.

That night I drank two bottles of wine alone in my room by five pm and drunkenly texted my gratitude and appreciation to my former boss as I began to slowly spiral into something deep and dark. Something that I didn’t yet have a name for. Depression had been my life long friend and companion, but this bout was a different beast altogether.

The following weeks went by like that as well. Go to class. Alternate between modes of self harm. Go to class. Do laundry. Mourn. Mourn for the death of my second home. Mourn for the loss of the boy that left me in November. Mourn for the other boy which I thought I loved that could never seem to do anything but be his own form of harm or maybe be the agent of harm that created the others. Go on dates with a third boy that only loved the drums.

I dated a boy from the time between Halloween and Thanksgiving who lived down the street from me. I didn’t love him either but he rendered me the hope that love lay somewhere near. He left the week before the second of the winter holiday triplets. The morning after I attended his live show. I had just stepped out of the shower when he knocked on my door. I wore a big tshirt and shorts and socks and my hair drip drip dropped onto the carpet as I hugged the boy and cried like a child. Please don’t go.

It was late January, a few weeks after Roxberry closed before I would go out on walks in my neighborhood again. I was too afraid of running into the November boy. It was that first walk. I went through the whole neighborhood. Past the big main road. Past graffiti and protest art and whizzing cars. Past my old high school. Past people and dogs and squirrels and birds. Past the park I’d gone to every week in school.

Then I saw him, the tall black cat walking out from between two houses.

When I first saw him I thought he was a mirage. But there he was. Tall, thin, sleek and shockingly clean black fur. He approached me, tail up, showing enthusiasm. I sank to my knees, hoping I would be graced with the privilege to stroke the cat’s fur. He immediately sauntered up to me and lay at my feet, belly up, ready to be pet. 

I sat on my feet and allowed the cat to perch on my knees. There were a plethora of friendly porch dwelling cats in my neighborhood. I expected to briefly pet the cat before moving on with my day. As it would turn out, that was not the case.

I finished petting the cat and stood up with the intention of going home, it was starting to get cold. The cat had no such intentions. It began to follow behind me as I walked. It did so for several blocks until we reached my house. He strode up to the porch as if it had been his home all along. 

“No, go home,” I said to the cat.

The cat ignored me and begged to be stroked again, rubbing against my legs and weaving around my feet.

I decided to walk back to where I had found the cat, in hopes that it would follow and stay where it belonged. I assumed it belonged to someone in one of the houses that it had emerged from behind. I had no such luck in my attempts to convince the cat to stay where I had found it.

The cat followed me back but as soon as I turned towards my own home, the cat matched my stride and was right in tow. I began to wonder if the cat was some sort of witches familiar and had chosen me as its master as it insisted on never straying from where I walked. I decided to go to the store and pick up some cat food. Maybe if the cat was still there when I returned, it really was meant to be mine.

Since the loss of Roxberry I had been looking for a sign to hold on, just a little longer, maybe this cat was that sign.

My mental health had taken a sharp decline in the previous months but the loss of my job was the tipping stone that sent me into a deep and dark depression. Everything was coated in a hazy black cloud. It was as if the weather was permanently rainy and I had perpetually left the house without an umbrella or coat. The cat resembled a dark cloud itself. I took that to mean that it was either the physical embodiment of my depression or the agent that would carry me out from within it. 

When I came back from the store, there the cat sat on my front porch. I offered it food. It was ravenous. Just like that. He became mine. I scooped him up and brought him inside. I named him Grover. I became his in the way that I wanted him to be mine but he never was. 

I missed my job with a ferocity that was only rivaled by my love for the cat, Grover. 

I started at Roxberry with the title of line staff the year I was seventeen. I left the year I was nineteen with the title of assistant manager. It took me through graduating high school, going away to college, coming home from college, and attending a new one in my hometown. It took me through the trauma of being bullied at my first university by the girls who lived in my dorm. It took me through being madly in obsession that I thought was love with the nineteen year old manager. Then watching him spiral into a drug addiction. It took me through the meeting of the boy I was presently in love with who only caused me pain. It took me through friendships lost and gained. 

I hated the job, in some ways. I resented the low pay and long hours. The overly religious zealot of an owner and his minion employees. But despite it all, nothing ever has or will compare. After I lost my job, I was left desperately seeking a replacement, in the cat, I found that.

Grover was my constant companion. He took me through the following months which were some of the worst of my life. When I thought about taking my own life that March, the fact that the cat would miss me was my rationale for staying alive. 

He followed me through the moving out of my house with roommates back into my parents house. Back to an apartment with roommates. Then one day, as quickly as he had come he was gone. Maybe he had been a mirage all along.

It was a cold December day around four in the morning when my roommate knocked on my door and said it,

“Grover got out the back door.”

Just like that. He was gone in the middle of the night and never returned.

Missing: Tall Black Cat, was what the posters read. 

I mourned for Grover but not in the way I had expected. Maybe he was only meant to be mine for a short while. Maybe he was a witches familiar and I had been his witch for a time before going on to find a new one. I got a year. For that, I am grateful.