Murphy’s Law by Risha Sona

A young man reflects on a dramatic breakup as he prepares to say goodbye to a loved one.

There is a heat wave in Los Angeles. It is one hundred and seventeen degrees Fahrenheit and everything feels personal. The sun beats down on the city like a toddler rapping its knuckles against the glass of a public aquarium. The heat is asking me to buy things I don’t need. A mini fridge to put my skincare in, an iced matcha, a membership to Soho House, just to see what happens in there. I’m in my thirties now, so it would be more expensive for me to join Soho House than it would have been when I was twenty-five. I make the hour drive from my home in Los Feliz to the veterinary office in the valley. The air conditioning in my car is weak, and the mix of hot and cold air makes my car smell like old crayons. No freeways, because I’m trying this thing where I leave twenty minutes early to go anywhere so I’m never rushing, because rushing is apparently bad for my pancreas, or something. Really I think the constraints I put on myself are punishing because I’m not sure I like when things are easy. I’m sweating and I’m worried that my cat won’t remember me.

I brought the cat home without telling my boyfriend, when we were twenty-four and starting to fall out of love. I was driving home from the only IKEA in Southern California that had the unfinished pine cabinets I wanted and pulled into the parking lot of an animal shelter to see the cats. I didn’t have any intention of bringing one home. He was in a steel box alone, tiny and black with a white exclamation point on his head, like he was a handwritten, punctuated note from God to me, and I could not bear to leave him behind. 

“What did you do…” Avery crouched over the kitten in our bathroom, his hair and parts of his hairline covered in chocolate brown box dye, which was already his natural hair color.

“He can be mine,” I promised, “I’ll take care of him and clean his litter box and pay for his food and everything. You won’t have to do a thing.”

I named him Murphy. I quickly learned that I hated scooping the litter box, which then became Avery’s chore. We broke up almost a year later, so Murphy and I didn’t get to be together for more than ten months.

I sometimes wish I had never met Murphy, that I didn’t take a route home that took me through Long Beach, that my life had moved so we never crossed paths. In that universe I already understood detachment and went home to eat fruit and read a book, maybe the Bible, because maybe I am religious in that universe like the white Catholic families I grew up around who always had clean homes and made it through dinner together every night without someone storming away or screaming. In that universe I am able to mind my own business.

As I pass the 101, I imagine what Murphy’s life would have been like if I had allowed him to be adopted by the fates. Maybe he would have been a young starlet’s cat, named elegantly after a spice or an expensive handbag, not an adage that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. He’d be living in a Spanish-style villa with grounds to roam and a Dyson just for his fur, a home where he’s loved furiously and has a cameo in an Architectural Digest tour. This is my cat, the actress would say, he’s as much a fixture of the house as the ghost of Cecil B. Demille.

I don’t think I’ve ever regretted meeting or loving Avery, though. Avery is my anchor even now — there was a me before Avery, a me during Avery, and me after Avery. He was my first love, and I didn’t know I was lovable before he decided to love me. When we were twenty-one, on the first day of summer break, I woke up to a text from him that said, I have feelings for you and I don’t know what to do with them. We’d both just moved off-campus and a coffee seemed like a simple setting for me to tell him that I wanted to stay friends, because I didn’t feel ready for romantic love yet, because I still had an out-of-state driver’s license and I didn’t know how to check my credit score. But when he sat across from me and I said this I thought about how I already loved him. What would change? We’d have sex? I hadn’t had sex yet. Wouldn’t it be better for my first time to be with someone I loved? Avery was so beautiful and everyone wanted him, but he wanted me. What if no one beautiful ever wanted me again? I kissed him a week later and asked him to be my boyfriend.

Four years later, we broke up, and in retaliation to his first brush with rejection, he went on a sex rampage and blew through four of my closest friends. He also told them that I cheated on him with my coworker, which was mostly a lie, and my friends stopped talking to me. Maybe to Avery it was the truth, but I’m not sure the subjectivity of truth is so malleable. I had to move across the city and planned to take Murphy with me, but Avery said it made more sense for him to stay put because Avery was staying in the big apartment we’d shared, and he planned on getting another cat anyway, so Murphy would have a friend. I believed him.

When our relationship started to die, somewhere around the time Avery started to smell bad to me, I started a job and grew close to a coworker whose presence in my life made me feel satiated and at the same time like I was missing out on something big. Nothing happened between us, and I got fired from my job before anything could and never saw her again. I know everything about her, he said to me weeks after we were broken up. I’d moved out and was starting to move on. I had just gone on a first date with a different woman who I remember wore leather bracelets but whose name and facial features I can no longer recall. 

“Respectfully, that’s just bullshit,” he spat on me literally, unintentionally, when I tried to mend whatever was happening so that we could stay friends and share custody of Murphy. “I know sexuality is nuanced or whatever but this is bullshit.” White people really love that word. I’d like to gift each of them a pocket thesaurus.

Eventually, Avery decided he never wanted to see me again, which I guess was his right. I didn’t hear from him until last night, years later. I’ve thought about Murphy almost every day. It was easy to say goodbye to a person who tried their best to hurt me, but it was not possible to say goodbye to a creature to whom I had promised I’d take care of. My creature.

In the years that we have been apart, Avery has somehow managed to hold onto his anger and also marry a man whose eyes, hair and skin are the same shade of brown as mine because, though I have forgiven him for everything, I think he is twisted and probably has a South Asian fat fetish. He, who often cried to me because he was “so embarrassed to be white,” and who didn’t even want a cat until I brought one home, got to spend years with my living typo while Murphy only existed in memory and mirage for me. I grew close to a woman and inspected my sacred queerness, and for that I was punished and my penance was losing Murphy.

In these same years, I have grown so accustomed to being alone that I prefer it, and I take pride in that. Dating is tedious and love is rare and nuclear. Maybe I am as cold, angry and undeserving as he claimed to me and everyone we knew years ago. Sometimes I believe him. I remember him asking, Did you ever love me? in the final cadence of our falling out and I did not answer. I’ve wrinkled, prematurely grayed, swelled and shrunk, fallen in and out of love at least twice since then, and I’m still not sure of the answer to his question. I don’t feel confident that I’m capable of loving anything other than Murphy. 

I often hear Murphy’s voice, I feel his little face in my hands, his cold nose on my always-sweaty palm. I see his eyes in the dark when I wake in the middle of the night, which is often, because I eat a lot of sugar before bed and have really vivid nightmares. Last night I baked and ate a full can of cinnamon rolls minutes before I fell asleep. I dreamt I was on a bike strapped to an escalator descending down from Griffith Observatory at sixty miles per hour and I couldn’t stop or slow down. I woke up to a burning in my groin from fear and for a few moments in the dark I saw Murphy at the foot of my bed. He was curled up and staring at me as though he’d been watching me have a bad dream. My phone rang, and it was Avery, calling from an emergency vet to tell me that it was Murphy’s time to go. All I feel in the morning is gratitude that I get to see my cat again.

When I walk into the exam room, Murphy is still, laying on his side. For a moment I panic that he’s crossed over already but then his eyes open to greet me and he looks at me from the same distance we looked at each other when I woke up from my nightmare last night, and it seems like he remembers being there. My ex is standing over him and he’s blonde.

“You look, like, incredible,” he says. “No, like, you look, like, so good. You’re like, basically my size now.”

I knew he would say something about my weight, like it’s a finish line that he drew for me without telling me. I’ve watched my reflection get smaller each day over the past few years and felt nothing. It never mattered. I stare at Murphy on the table, so quiet. I’ve never seen him stay still. His paws are bigger and his legs look shorter but he is still ridiculous. All three of us have experienced the last seven years differently. Murphy looks old, almost wilted, and his exclamation point is more of just an amorphous blob now. I feel sad for him that he has to die in a place I know for a fact he hates.

I take his paw and he lets me hold it in mine. I have the thought that there is not a lifetime in which we wouldn’t find each other, and maybe in the next one we’ll get to hang out more.

Avery and I talk in the parking lot after Murphy’s gone. It’s dusk, there is a family loading their puppy into a crate in a car identical to mine. I feel something very bitter when I look at them. For a moment I imagine I belong to them. I think about people who get a new pet almost immediately after losing one. I wonder if I will ever get to love anything or anyone again. We discuss nothing in particular, except for Murphy, of whom I receive recent stories I haven’t heard.

“I think his infection precipated this,” he says, like that explains everything. “Maybe he wouldn’t have died if I’d taken him to the vet sooner.” He was eight. Some cats live to be thirty. I don’t respond to him. I’m no longer obligated to talk to him in circles about things that can’t be fixed.

“What are you thinking?” he asks. I feel like I killed him because I am a selfish person who left him with a man who wasn’t sure how to love him.

“I think you might mean precipitated, not ‘precipated,’” I say.

We look at each other like we’re in a museum and one of us farted but neither will own up to it. He nods, then turns away and walks straight to his car without a word. I stand still in the lot, the tar still hot from today’s sun, and watch him drive away to his husband, whose absence I appreciated today. When I arrive home it’s late, I’m too tired to do anything and fall asleep on my couch. 

I wake in the tarry hours of the morning, when it’s both too late and too early and shadows are still. I am disoriented and my mouth is dry and the television is blaring the loud opening credits of something I watched as a teenager. When my eyes adjust, I see Murphy curled at my feet, as vivid as he’s ever been, as though time has folded in on itself and delivered him back to me. He’s alive and breathing. His small body rises and falls and the marking on his head looks like an exclamation point again, refracting the full moon’s light streaming in through my window.