[ameliaflame]

When I was little I had a cat named Couger. Couger went everywhere with me, I think he knew how fragile and tiny I was and tried to make up for it. (I was born really premie, and the doctors didn't think I would live) Every night he would come into my room and curl up next to me, and I would fall asleep to his soft pur. Couger was a stray before he was my pet, though, and I think he always kept some of that wildness in him. My parents fed tis scrawny tabby cat for years, then one day he came to their house in New Orleans with a broken leg and a scarred up face. They took him to the vet and decided to keep him. So the cat was named Couger, and he went with my parents and brother when they moved to Seattle, then to New Hampshire where i was born. He would prowl by day, hunting (probably, sadly, rats) but as soon as I came home from kindergarten he was mine. We would wack in the swamps, where my mom told me not to go, or run down to the park down the hill. Everyone knew Couger. And I loved Couger. He was such a big part of my life it was impossible not to. But then he started getting sick. He moved lethargically, and stayed on my bed most of te time. Then one day when I came home from school (I was about 6) my mom said that he had died. And that was my first experience with grief. I felt horrible and cried a lot for months, and then I guess Couger was just buried in my memory. I just started to think of him for the first time in 8 years.