Around Feb/March 2020, I lived in a North African capital along the Mediterranean coast. For over 3 months, the whole country was in strict lockdown due to the pandemic. Only 3 things kept me going: a pair of kittens and my novel manuscript.
I’d been working on this particular novel since June 2007. There were a lot of versions over the years, and although I had soft copies in my backups, they were earlier drafts. Two hard copies with extensive marginal notations were not in my computer anymore after over 12-13 years. So I brought two 200-page manuscripts back with me to fix and align, and the pandemic lockdown served as perfect opportunity.
I’ve been playing with computers since 1993. Since high school, I can type terribly quickly. So in the span of a few weeks, I retyped the whole novel, annotations, corrections, and all, and began work on upping the word count from 64,000ish words to 81,000 as it is now.
But in the backdrop of so much typing, I only had two companions to talk to: Bo (orange) and Arrow (black), kittens and brothers and I only adopted them just before the lockdown started.
Arrow, not pictured, was true to his name. He’d get zoomies any hour of any day. Bo, however, was sweet, climbing up my back with his tiny claws to lick and groom my messy hair.
The two of them would fall asleep over my wrists while I typed, or Bo would climb up to my shoulders or back and groom my hair furiously while I typed. They provided intense amusement.
Unfortunately, when I returned to the Philippines, I had to leave the two behind.
Repatriation flights don’t allow pets on board, with only one or two historic exceptions, which do not always translate to new guidelines allowing such. And due to health problems, I returned on the first repatriation flight out of North Africa.
I left them in the care of my driver’s cousin with a sack of food and some money, until that ran out and they were adopted away… I hope they’re big and fluffy now, but I’ll never really know. Lost contact and all that.
So to remember them, here’s a photo of kitten Bo, taking a rest from cleaning my hair while I worked.
I miss them.