It's always hard when a beloved pet crosses the Rainbow Bridge. It's even harder when it happens right before a holiday break from college, as it did in my own case. It was the worst thing to walk back into a home without having my favorite feline come to greet me with his meow that I could recognize a mile away. It was even harder seeing how much his non-prescence there affected my dad, who had been particularly close to our favorite boy.

That was over Thanksgiving, and by Christmas, my parents and I realized that we needed to have that emptiness in the house filled again, and so on the day before New Year's Eve, we went to go and pick up a rescue kitten we'd fallen in love with on the local humane society's website. We met him and held him in the adoption center, and then took him home. I had a week left of my Christmas break, and so over that time, we kept him in my room so that we wouldn't lose such a tiny baby somewhere in the house, and he and I got to bond and get to know eachother.

I hated having to leave him for the second semester, but it made Spring Break all the more exciting of a prospect. Until I got home and realized that Levi didn't recognize me anymore.

Seeing his eyes go wide and watching him flee under the nearest couch was hard for me, but after a few days of this, it made me reflect on what it meant to have a new cat that wasn't the one I had known before. I watched him from a comfortable distance each day, and watched him snuggle up with my parents, and studied his habits and his favorite toys and hiding spots. I realized he was completely different from the cat we lost; his body was different, his walk was different, his meow was different, his personality was different. By the last days, when I found myself in those few moments that he would let me pet him and hold him and play with him, I found that I still was learning to love him the way I loved our previous cat. I was so glad for those times because it gave me a moment to snuggle and remember what it's like to be so enraptured with a pet. Something tells me that I'll probably have to start the process all over again when I go home for the summer, but at least I'll start off knowing that I have fallen in love with this cat who is certainly not the one who came before him, but is the perfect joy to make our family whole.