#oneaday Day 737: Returning to reality

We go home tomorrow, which is going to be somewhat bittersweet, as I'm sure you can imagine. There has been absolutely no sign of Oliver over the course of the last week, no contact from anyone who has seen him, no sightings reported on social media and — perhaps thankfully? — no reports that he has passed away. So I choose to believe that he is still out there, somewhere, just waiting for us to find him. Perhaps it's all a game to him. He does love a game.

grayscale photography of concrete road during daytime — Photo by Airam Vargas on Pexels.com

I am, of course, still absolutely sick with worry. It has been two weeks today that he went missing, and whatever happens, I am always, always going to be wondering if there was more we could have done — more we should have done. There are zillions of online resources out there saying what you "should" do when a cat goes missing, but a significant proportion of them appear to be AI-generated drivel and pseudoscience.

I am not willing to give up on him, though. At this point, it feels like it will be unlikely that he will come home by himself for whatever reason, but I still want to go looking for him and will be doing so when we return home tomorrow. I don't know if I will be able to achieve anything — over the course of two weeks, it's entirely possible he could have gone a long way, although most supposed "experts" (with the caveat above) seem to believe that cats who spend the majority of their time indoors, as Oliver did, won't have actually ventured very far, and are probably hiding silently somewhere they feel is "safe". This, unfortunately, makes them extremely difficult to track down; the most supposedly reliable advice appears to be to bring things that are "familiar" to them — things that they recognise the smell or sound of.

Part of me is concerned that he has simply been taken by someone. Not necessarily stolen as such, but perhaps he was seen somewhere, the owner didn't think to get his microchip checked, and now thinks that they have a wonderful new cat in their family. If that has happened, I have absolutely no idea how we would go about finding him — although if this has happened, his status will be flagged up if and when he is taken to the vets or a shelter or something, and that, in turn, would allow us to be reunited. But that, of course, depends on the person in question thinking to take him to a vet or shelter — if indeed this is the situation in which he has found himself.

As I've said repeatedly over the course of the last two weeks, though, the absolutely impossible thing throughout all this is just not knowing anything. What made him jump out of the window? Which way did he go? Was he just exploring, or was he running from something? Is he hurt? Is he hungry? Has he been taking care of himself for the last two weeks? Has someone else been taking care of him for the last two weeks? I don't have any answers, and these myriad questions swirling around my brain are driving me absolutely spare.

I'm supposed to be going back to work on Tuesday, and it'll be right back into a difficult, stressful time, too. Honestly I'm not sure I'm going to be able to cope. I am wracked with pain, sadness, guilt, anger, frustration and all manner of other emotions, and I still don't really know how to process any of them, or how to direct any of them in a vaguely productive direction — either for getting some work done, or for tracking down our precious boy.

As with any difficult time, I guess it's just going to have to be a "one step at a time" sort of situation. I want to think this is all going to end happily and become a funny story to share in the years to come, but I am also fearing the worst. I don't want to lose him. He is so, so precious to me.

There is nothing I can do from where I am right now, though. Tomorrow is a new day, and we can decide what we need to do from there. So the best thing I can probably do at the moment is get some rest and try to come to tomorrow as alert and refreshed as is possible under the circumstances.

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#oneaday Day 729: The struggle for your emotions to be heard

One of the things I find difficult and, at times, frustrating to deal with, perhaps particularly as a person with an autistic spectrum condition, is properly conveying the emotions that I am feeling and the depth of those emotions. Our recent anguish over Oliver's disappearance is a prime example of this. I am feeling intense amounts of pain, sadness, anger, fear, grief and all manner of other emotions over this situation, on a pretty much continual basis, and yet I'm not sure if I have accurately conveyed that to anyone.

woman checking compass on trail — Photo by Ali Kazal on Pexels.com

It's not as if I haven't tried to do so. But I feel like any time I have attempted to — with the exception of my therapist yesterday, who is trained in such matters, and my family members, who have been through situations like this and thus understand — I have simply got a response that is, at best, a cursory "oh, Pete, I'm so sorry" and then nothing much after that.

I'm not really sure what I'm expecting or wanting from other people, to be honest. But something about it just doesn't quite feel… "enough", you know? I am here, devastated at the potential loss of a family member — because make no mistake, Oliver is a family member — and I feel like a lot of people I've expressed this to have pretty much forgotten this fact almost as soon as they have given the appropriate response as defined by the unwritten social contract we all agree to.

To be clear, I'm not angry at anyone who has responded this way and I'm not annoyed that very few people have reached out to see how I'm doing as the week goes on. I know that everyone has their own things going on in their lives, and their own priorities of things to care about. I cannot reasonably expect people who are not directly involved in this situation to care about it as much as I do. I know that.

But I think what the problem is, is that this is putting my overall loneliness somewhat into perspective. There simply are not very many people left in my life that I feel like I can express these things to, and that they will give a shit. It is at times like this where you really feel like you need people in your life to support you, to uplift you, to distract you from the dark thoughts swirling around inside your head, and when you simply don't really have that outside of your immediate family members, it can feel a tad difficult to deal with.

I think about how I might feel if someone close to me was dealing with such mental anguish, and how I would want to be there to support them. I think about how I have been with people who were once close to me who have been through similarly challenging periods of intense, sustained emotion. Perhaps I am the one who overdid it? Perhaps I was overbearing, smothering? I don't know. It felt like the right thing for me to do at the time, and the people in question seemed to appreciate it, too.

It's just so difficult. Like I say, I really don't know what emotion I am really "supposed" to be feeling right now, because the fact is I simply still do not know what the situation actually is. All I know is that Oliver is missing, and his condition is unknown. And until we learn something more about what has actually happened, that uncertainty is going to be probably the leading cause of the intense sadness and frustration that both Andie and I are feeling right now.

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#oneaday Day 725: A spark of hope

Oliver still hasn't come back. We are, of course, still extremely worried and upset, and this is made all the more difficult by the fact that Patti has clearly realised something is wrong, too. She is very obviously looking around to try and find him, and earlier she let out an absolutely plaintive wail of a meow that made my heart absolutely break. I know, Patti. I want to make noises like that, too. But there is, at least, a faint spark of hope.

We've previously posted Oliver's picture and details on some local Facebook pages — the one thing Facebook is actually still vaguely useful for — and earlier today we took around a bunch of flyers to the houses and flats in the nearby vicinity. In the mid-afternoon I got a call from someone down the road; they weren't sure it was Oliver, but they had definitely seen a ginger cat on their back wall recently, and thought that he was "a very friendly chap".

Now, we're trying not to get our hopes up too much, because we know there is another ginger cat in the neighbourhood. The lady who called sounded like she hadn't seen the cat she saw before, however, which leads me to believe that it might, just might have been Oliver. There's also the fact that Andie has apparently encountered "the other ginger cat" and said that it was rather skittish as opposed to friendly; Oliver, meanwhile, has always got along with absolutely everyone he meets, and the personality of the cat our caller described very much sounded like him.

So we have not given up. We cannot give up. I refuse to give up. My heart is battered and bruised and broken from the last few days, and it is difficult to derive any joy from anything. But I cannot give up. I will not give up. He must be out there somewhere, and all we need to do is bring him home.

I do not yet know how we are going to do that, or indeed where he is. But this one little happening today helped me feel just one little spark of hope about the whole situation, and that is something that has been sorely needed since late on Sunday night.

I, of course, do not know how this particular episode of our lives is going to turn out. There is always the possibility that it will end in tragedy, and that is something I don't think I am prepared for. But, as my therapist has said to me on multiple occasions now, I am a survivor, and while I have faced many hardships on life's journey to date, I have made it through all of them so far.

I don't want to have to keep being a survivor, though. I want things to be nice, and happy, and free of worry, and neat. Life, however, is far from neat; simple existence is one of the messiest things imaginable, and I have not yet figured out how — or even if it's possible — to tidy it up.

And so, we continue. For now, we continue, not knowing. Tonight we will walk the streets once again in search of our beloved little man. And tomorrow is another day, whatever that might bring.

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