I was sitting down on the couch, relaxing with my morning coffee and some product review videos before Dom came back for our big road trip when I noticed something strange: I hadn’t been pounced on all morning. This of course meant that our female cat, Simple Kitty, was missing and, on further inspection, she was nowhere to be found in any of her usual haunts.

Whenever I can’t find her, my panic grows exponentially due to her complete and total incompetence to ensure her own survival. In the back of my mind, I think I’m still traumatized by those Final Destination movies where someone cheats death and then all of a sudden every blender, car and piano moving service is out to get them to even the score. Since she did have to be revived six times at birth, I’m pretty sure she has at least six kitty grim reapers coming for her scrawny ass at any given time. Maybe that would explain her tendency to stare blankly at nothing in a state of dismay for three hours.

When she goes missing, my head immediately forms a list of all the ways she could have met her demise:

1. Escape. When Cat Ass, Simple Kitty’s older brother, accidentally got out once, my first thought was, “Aw, shit, sorry birds.” If Simple Kitty ever escaped, my first thought would be, “Aw, shit, she’s gonna starve.”

2. She’s been crushed underneath a recliner.

3. She forgot how to breathe and we’re going to find her by the smell of her tiny decaying corpse in a few days.

4. There’s an inter-dimensional rift somewhere in our apartment and she fell into the Twilight Zone.

5. Cat Ass finally did it. He ate her. I’m gonna be cleaning up cat shit made from cat for a week now. Like a nesting doll of cannibalism.

6. Jesus was bored up there and decided he wanted a pet.

7. She’s under the oven again. Shit, we’re going to smell her tiny toasted body in a few hours.

It turned out, to my relief and dismay, that none of these actually happened. I was busy entering the first stage of Cat Grief when I decided to clean. I clean in the rare event that I get sad or upset about something. All of a sudden I heard a tiny “MEW.”

I froze. “SIMPLE KITTY? Simple Kitty, where are you??” Surely I must have missed her. I looked under the bed again, in all the closets, and made another full round of search to no avail. By the time I came back in the room I was trying to come up with ways to explain to Dom that our cat was somehow in another dimension now. My guess is that the Little Girl Lost episode of the Twilight Zone was really made as an instructional video for this purpose.

“MEW.”

There is nothing more frustrating and panicking than the sound of a panicked, mentally disabled cat in another dimension. I grabbed another pile of clothes and opened the dresser drawer to put them away and there she was, nestled in my pants with a blank look on her face.

I hate cats.