KOTEHOK

I have a lot of friends and a lot of stories on this site, but this post is about the single most important little creature in my life. She is a small black cat, and depending on the day I call her about a million different names, but her name is KOTEHOK, and I love her more than I really know how to put into words.

I believe, and I know this sounds like a lot, that adopting an animal is a kind of collaboration between you and the universe. You do not really pick them. You show up with an open heart at the right moment, and the right creature finds you. I have not adopted many animals in my life, but every time I have just followed my gut, and every time the universe has been generous. KOTEHOK is the best thing it ever handed me.

The day I found her

In the spring of 2012 I bought my first house and moved out of my parents’ place. Right before I left, my parents had gotten a new gray kitten, and that kitten had started to become my buddy, so moving into my own empty house meant suddenly living somewhere with no little animal friend at all. It felt wrong. I called my mom one day and told her I was thinking about getting a cat or a dog, and she talked me into a cat. So we made a plan: lunch, and then the St. Charles Humane Society, which happens to be right by my community college.

I have always believed in rescuing rather than buying. There are so many animals out there who already need a home; you do not need to go to a pet shop. So I went in not really planning to leave with anyone, just to look, because for me adopting is a gut thing and I wanted to see if anything pulled at me.

A guy was giving us the tour, and after a bit I asked if I could just wander and look on my own. Two cats caught me. One was a black cat with long fur, which I had never had before. The other was a little black cat off by herself with a note on her cage that said, more or less, this cat loves to escape, do not open this door if the main door to the building is open. And I have always had a soft spot for the misunderstood ones. Something in me just thought, I bet she is not the troublemaker they say she is.

I told the guy those were the two I was curious about. He immediately steered me to the long-haired one: that is the one you want, trust me. So we went into a little meeting room with a scratching post and some toys, and he brought her in, and she was sweet enough, sort of a ragdoll, but there was just nothing between us. No spark on her end, and honestly not much on mine, and by the time I was done holding her I was coated head to toe in fur. I knocked on the door and told him I did not feel a bond. He said these things take time. I said I understood, but I would really like to meet that other black cat, the one with the sign.

He gave me a look, shrugged, and basically told me I did not want that cat, she was trouble. I said I wanted to see her anyway, she was pretty. So he went and got her, and he carried her in upside down like a baby, rubbing at her belly, which she clearly hated, and told me that if I took her I would have to do this constantly to get her used to it. I said, she does not seem to like that, so let’s not. Let’s just be nice to her. He set her down and she shot straight under the scratching post to hide.

And that hit me, because it was exactly what my childhood cat, Jupiter, did the day we brought her home, when she vanished under the TV cabinet. Jupiter was never warm to strangers but adored our family, and watching this little black cat hide gave me the most familiar feeling. So I got down on the floor and talked to her, hey kitty, hello, and after a bit I gently pulled her out, and she just settled onto my lap and let me pet her. That was it. That was the bond. Beautiful green eyes, and on her cage her name was Jade.

The guy told me her story, and it broke my heart a little. She was under a year old. She had already been adopted once and then returned, because the family found her too shy, not interactive enough, not the cat they were after. Her belly was shaved from being recently spayed. So I would be her third home: the litter she was born into, the family that gave her back, and me. I told him I did not care what the sign said or what he thought. I felt something between us, and I wanted to take her home. So they gave her the shots that come with the adoption, I paid around a hundred dollars, and they put her in a box.

She cried the entire drive. She had no idea what was happening, and I just talked to her the whole way. We stopped at Walmart, and my mom ran in for a litter box, litter, and food while I sat with her in the car with the air running. When we finally got home, I carried her down to the basement, and the second I opened the box she bolted behind an old piano that had come with the house, far too heavy for us to move. So we just left her be: food, water, litter, lights on, and let her come out when she was ready. My mom went home. I went up to my computer room and did my own thing.

And later that night, she came and found me. She walked right up, curious, like she was asking who I was and where she had landed, and we played with her new toys, and she was friendly and sweet. That was the beginning of what is now a fourteen-year relationship, and counting.

Her name

She came to me as Jade, but I renamed her. At the time I was idly messing around with learning Russian, with no real intention of ever getting good at it, and I decided to call her черный котёнок (chernyy kotyonok), which means “black kitten.” Read in our alphabet, the kitten half, котёнок, looks like KOTEHOK, and that is the name that stuck as hers. Day to day, and on her chart at the vet, I just call her Kite, like a kite in the sky.

The truth is I almost never use her real name. Over fourteen years I have given her a ridiculous pile of nicknames. She is baby girl, baby kitty, princess, smoke, little black, the throw-up monster, mascarpone, and Russell, because she loves to burrow into the covers and rustle around. Sometimes she is just “the little butt,” because she is so completely black that when she walks away with her tail straight up, all you can really make out is a little butt floating across the room.

My favorite, though, is Stoffel, after a honey badger I once saw in a video, a famous escape artist who kept breaking out of his enclosure to go find trouble. I call her that as a joke about the sign on her cage at the shelter, except I eventually figured out what the sign got wrong. She does not want to escape. She just cannot stand a closed door. She hates being shut in, shut out, wrapped up, or left alone, and she will work at a closed door until it opens. It was never mischief. She just wants to be wherever her people are.

What she is like

She is almost entirely black, with a little white on her chest and some white fluff in her armpits and the backs of her legs. She is small and petite and has stayed trim her whole life. People who meet her always comment on how lovely and fit she is, and the reason is simple: unlike every other cat I have known, she has never once overindulged. I put food down, she eats exactly as much as she wants, and she walks away. She is finicky without being picky.

And her eyes. They are a deep green that shifts with the light. In some light they go almost yellow, and if I happen to be wearing a blue shirt they turn the most startling ocean blue, so vivid it does not look real.

She runs on ritual, all on her own schedule. If I have been gone more than a couple of hours, ninety-nine times out of a hundred she is waiting at the top of the landing when I come in from the garage, or hurrying to get there. She wants to say hello, she wants to sniff my finger, she wants one scratch behind the ear, and then, immediately, the only question that really matters to her: when do I get a treat. The routine never changes. Hello, sniff, scratch, and then we walk straight to the treats, and she somehow always knows exactly where I last set the bag down, no matter which table or counter or nightstand it ended up on. I am writing part of this in the car on the way home, and I already know that when I walk in, every beat of that will happen, even if she is tired or not feeling well. She always makes time for it.

She knows she is dark, I swear she does. She seeks out dark places to disappear into: the black comforter, a pile of dark jeans, the dark sofa she loves. Early on I gave her a bed in the cold, dark space under the guest room bed, and she took to it so completely that I kind of regret it, because for years it was where she would vanish.

Once in a while, with a lot of supervision, she gets to go outside. I put her in a little harness, which she finds deeply insulting, and then she mostly just sits in the grass looking regal and eating a few blades, but she loves it.

A few more things about her. She loves to smell, and gently chew, red rose petals; every spring when the bush out front blooms she gets to have one, and she slurps it down like a noodle the moment it is near her (these days I keep it to a single petal, just to be safe about her health). She is my office companion and would rather be in the room with me than anywhere else. There is a bird feeder right outside the window specifically for her, so when she is bored she can sit on her cardboard perch and watch the birds and squirrels and think her little murderous thoughts. Sometimes I pull up videos made for cats on YouTube and watch her eyes track the birds across the screen.

When she wants to play, she flops down hard on her side, and that is the signal: string and toys, never a belly rub. She has hated belly rubs since the day I met her, which always makes me think of that guy at the shelter mashing her belly and insisting that was the way. Her skin down there is so sensitive that it ripples when you touch it, like a ticklish flinch, so I never push it. What she loves is her chin scratched, the spot behind her ears, and being petted. One of the stranger discoveries of my life is that she absolutely loves being petted with a wooden chopstick. I had some big wooden cooking chopsticks I never used, tried one on her fur on a whim, and she melted; she will sit there for fifteen or twenty minutes getting brushed with a wooden stick. Turns out any wood stick will do.

She does not have a single mean cell in her body. In fourteen years she has never hissed at me, never bitten me, never so much as growled. Her whole spirit is kindness. If she has one flaw, it is that when she is bored or hungry she chews on cords. She has destroyed countless headphone cables, and most of my HDMI and computer cords have little tooth marks in them. My ears have become tuned to the exact sound of a cat chewing a cord; I will be half asleep and hear it from across the house and shoot up to stop her, not because I care about the cords, but because I have always been quietly terrified she would someday bite into a live one. So far, thank goodness, she never has.

Why I started working from home

For the first eight or nine years of her life, she was home alone all day. I would leave for a long commute and a full day of computer work, and for a stretch I was also doing night school, which meant there were days this poor little creature was by herself from six in the morning until ten at night. We always had our weekends, but it gnawed at me.

So one of the real reasons I moved to working from home in 2019 was her. I did the math and realized we were probably somewhere around the halfway point of her life, and I did not want to keep missing it. I wanted to actually be there for the back half. It remains one of the best decisions I have ever made, and most of the reason was a cat.

A scary year she got through

In 2025 she got seriously sick. It was the most frightening stretch of our whole time together, and it is honestly still hard for me to think about, so I will keep this part simple. The one thing I want you to have before anything else: she got through it, and she is okay.

That spring we had a Japan trip planned, and about a week before we were supposed to leave, something was off. She would not come out of her bed. At first I gave her space, because everyone has an off day, even cats. But it did not pass, and even though I had gone far too long without taking her in, I found a vet and brought her. They thought constipation at first. It was not. She had a kidney stone, and it had lodged in her urethra. They told me she had about a seventeen percent chance to live, and asked if I wanted to try IV fluids and medication. She had never cost me a real dime in thirteen years beyond litter and food, and I was not about to not try. So we took her to the emergency hospital, they shaved her little leg and ran fluids and medicine, and it was genuinely terrifying. But she is a trooper, and against the odds she passed the first stone and pulled through. We cancelled the spring Japan trip and rebooked it for that November.

We knew there was a second, larger stone still up in the kidney, sitting there like a loaded gun. In August it moved, and the same thing started again. This time we tried treating it at home, which meant me pushing a needle under the skin on her back every few days to give her fluids, and Friday x-rays to track the stone’s progress. It was traumatizing for both of us. I tried to manage her pain, but the medication just left her dizzy and collapsing, and no dose I tried made it better. The stone crept almost all the way to her bladder before the vet and I agreed she needed the emergency hospital again. I checked her in certain it would be a long fight, and somehow, in a single night, it was done and passed.

She came out of that year with stage two chronic kidney disease. She is on a special kidney diet now, and I push water on her constantly, and I treat her like the absolute princess she is. The good news is real: her kidney numbers have held steady since that August, and she had a great checkup in May 2026, with a strong heart and clear lungs. With the right food and enough water, a cat can live a long time like this. So we are hopeful. Through all of it, my friend Mary was right there with me, the way she always is.

My baby girl

If that scare did anything good, it knocked loose any part of me that had ever taken her for granted. She has never cost me a thing but love, and being reminded how much of my ordinary, everyday happiness is simply her being here made me appreciate her more than I already did. So I tell her I love her every single day now, out loud, because I mean it and because she deserves to hear it.

In fact, I just got home while finishing this, and here she is. She met me at the door and meowed. I said hi, baby. She yawned, shook her sleepy little head, sniffed my hand, let me rub her head, and is now standing very pointedly next to the treats, because some things never change. She is not a baby anymore, but she will always be my baby. KOTEHOK, my princess, the best thing the universe ever handed me. Here is to many more years of exactly this.