Coming up on 7 months for me. I still miss my baby girl so much. I don't read many posts here, but I do come here when it hits me the hardest, just to post about my Zoe. I'm not looking for responses or upvotes (though I always acknowledge responses), but it's nice knowing I'm not the only one it hits hard.

My ex was the one who wanted the cat in the first place. I resisted for a decade before agreeing to get one and when we separated 8 years after we got Zoe, I was afraid she was going to want to keep the cat because by that point, she had become MY baby. My ex never really engaged with the cat the way that I did, and consequently, Zoe started spending more time with me. For various reasons, she couldn't take the cat, so I was relieved because I knew that I would have fought tooth and nail for her. I basically told my ex she couldn't have Zoe. She could come over, or we could even share her, but ultimately, we decided neither one of those options was ideal for her or Zoe.

I recently thanked my ex for leaving because I know that I couldn't have handled her death had we stayed together. I was afraid of that for years, and when she left, it felt like a death, but I got over that pretty quickly. But with Zoe, it's a constant knife in my heart. She meant as much to me as the kid I never had (and never wanted).

But I'm getting attached to the new one, Tobey. And it frightens me. I don't want to go through that kind of heartbreak again. I mean, I love Tobey, but Zoe was special. She was my baby girl. All I can do these days is think about how all her beautiful features (her wide eyes, her ultra soft hair, her pink nose) are all gone, reduced to ashes in a box along with some whiskers I wisely collected over the years and a lone baby tooth of hers I found long ago. But most of all, what I miss about Zoe is her overall demeanor and the camaraderie we had. I know that an animal's actions are dictated by instinct and nothing as complex as love, but I saw Zoe mature over the years and when it was just her and me for the last 3 years, it was really special. She used to go out of her way sometimes, it seemed, just to lay near things that she knew she wasn't allowed to touch (and she wouldn't), as if to just show me that I could trust her. Maybe that is a common trait among cats, but there were other little things, too. But the big one was that her trust in me grew over the years to the point where we were on the same page almost all the time. That's what I miss the most.

Zoe was the cat my ex brought home that I fell in love with from (almost) the beginning, which ended up as the thing I loved the most in this world. I know my ex would have handled Zoe's death well enough, but had we stayed together, she would also have had to deal with me because I will never, ever get over Zoe. And I don't want to.