You’ll remember him. You’ll remember what it felt like and smelled like to bury your nose in his soft little belly risking life and limb amongst those murder mittens to take a deep warm breath. You’ll remember all those things. With time you’ll think of it less frequently and it’ll bring less sorrow when you do. The memories will still be inside you, he will still be with you. Something will remind you of him in a few weeks’ time and it’ll hit you like a ton of bricks. The same memory in a year will be more gentle and joyful. It hurts so much because you love him so much. That love won’t go away. Your grief now will become gratitude and fondness in time. You honor him now by feeling and acknowledging the pain. Don’t allow yourself or anyone else to minimise it because we’re not talking about a human. He was walking around on four legs carrying a big chunk of your soul. That loss is as real and devastating as any other. It’s not brave to be stoic and push it down. It’s brave to own it, and feel it which is what you’re doing. He was very lucky to have you as his human, and vice versa.
With time and healing, you may find that you feel the need put all that love somewhere. Know that if you do, no matter how soon, or how far from now, you’re not undermining his importance in your life. It’s ok to find another lil soul who needs that love and will thrive in it, and give it back ten-fold, just like beautiful Alistair.
It sounds like you have a beautiful group of friends around you. That doesn’t happen without being the kind of person who attracts them. By all counts you’re a good person, let them be your crutches while you’re finding your feet again. You’d do the same for them.
He’s such a beautiful SIC (standard issue cat). Absolutely gorgeous soft coat, looks more like a pelt. I’m sorry you feel like you didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, I promise you - from those photos it’s completely clear that he knew he was safe and loved and that he loved you too. He’d found his human. He knows x
Hehe, I don’t have access to my computer atm but would love to shop his face onto the Andrew photo in the back of the cop car that’s doing the rounds atm.
Good grief - that’s wild, but somehow wholly unsurprising. Asylum seeker from Uganda to FBI Director. It’s the American Dream™️. I can’t imagine his mother could be proud of this version of her son. I hope she’s disappointed as hell, not because she deserves it, but so he has to at least face that reality, because whatever bug-eye inducing, drug-fuelled, taxpayer-funded fever dream he’s living isn’t anyone else’s reality (no one with a soul anyway)
In Australia school age kids (early/mid teens) often do “work experience” in their school holidays or after school. They approach local businesses they might have some kind of interest in learning and spend that time unpaid and helping out. You get exposed to how a business works, prob have to do the boring or messy scut work, but that’s part of it; and when they finish up if they had a good attitude and were productive and worked hard - it can many times turn into a part time job. At the least you could get a written reference from them about your time there, and use that to start building out your CV and help you get a job elsewhere. It’s also great for helping you work out what you might like to do moving forward. At the least if your home dynamic isn’t always great and your folks can be a bit overprotective - it’s a structured way for you to spend some time out of the house that they may find more reasonable and be more comfortable with than your going out and just getting a job. They need to transition into you getting older and more independent too.
Snort enough adderall and anyone can cram/rote learn enough temporarily to scrape through a degree. Did he pass the bar anywhere? I assume it’s a case of that old joke - what do you call a guy who partied all through med school, stole the answers to exams and scraped through by the skin of his teeth? “Doctor”.
Salt of the earth.