Romeo and Juliet

Every mother prepares for their child’s first love—the moment when their kid realizes there is someone more important in the world than mommy and daddy, the ephemeral infatuation with another being that surpasses all semblance of rationality and reason. First love is an inevitability, a hard and cruel fact of life that every parent must resign themselves to.

But what’s the only thing worse than a child’s first love? The forbidden kind.

And that, my friends, is where I find myself. Darcy has fallen in love. With the cat across the hall.

Mordi is an eighteen pound tomcat that belongs to our American neighbors. He, like Darcy, went through the quarantine process and now embraces a rabies-free, cat-like lifestyle in the great land of Australia. One night, Darcy was scampering about the hallway as Liz and I were talking, when Mordi escaped from the apartment. Liz caught him in her arms and kept him from running away, but Darcy was never the same. Ever since that fateful night, she spends hours pining away at the door, can’t pass the neighbor’s apartment without stopping and wagging her tale (and occasionally yipping a message of love), and even wakes up whining in the middle of the night.

Alas! Of all the forbidden relationships that have graced the pages of well-loved stories—Capulets and Montagues, vampires and humans, little children and their stuffed teddy bears that are imagined to live in the Hundred Acre Woods (I’m looking at you, Christopher Robin)—isn’t this the most hopeless of them all? Cats and dogs: sworn enemies since the dawn of time. Opposites at their very core. The whole different species thing, for crying out loud.

I knew it would happen one day, but I didn’t think it would be like this.

On the other hand, who ever does?