....My Shadow Kitty....

My cat Shadow died today.
I've had him for about 2 and a half years.
He was a perverted, horny-as-heck cat, but he was still my kitty.
He was a loyal kitty; whenever I was sick and I was sent home from school for vomiting and crap, or if I had the stomach flu, he'd break into my room (I'm serious, my cats know how to open my door, but then again, it's a door handle, not a door knob, so that's not too hard to imagine) and jump onto my bed and cuddle up to me and keep me company, and he wouldn't run away in fear when I suddenly lurched forward, grabbed a nearby trash can and puked my stomach acids into it (unlike the other cats, who'd run like heck as if I was some kind of monster); he'd just stay on my bed and watch calmly until I was done, and fall back asleep, purring.
It's for that kind of thing that I admired my cat Shadow so much, even if he is usually the one causing mischief in my house (he likes to take revenge on people who don't pay attention to him by pooping and peeing on purpose on the floor, and heck, he even pees in mop buckets, on our table, and I think he even peed on the clean dishes once).

It just sucks the way he went.
Oddly enough, the scenario seemed.....hauntingly familiar, to a point.
On Sunday, Shadow went missing. We hadn't seen him all day, and we looked briefly for him, kept an eye for him to come back, thinking that he had just been exploring outside, since we hardly let our cats outside, and whenever they are outside, Shadow's usually the one venturing down the stairs and around close to the staircase. But he didn't come back.

This morning, while we were going downstairs to go to school, I saw my mom's car, waiting at the edge of the "exit," I suppose, of where we live. I wondered if she was waiting for something, then I saw my dad rush past my mom's car, in one hand holding the bag of stuff for my brother's party at school, and in the other, I had noticed that he had Shadow. I was too far away to tell, but at first it seemed like my dad had just found Shadow and was picking him up like he normally would. But then I noticed something seemed wrong, with the urgency in the way my dad was rushing, and I noticed that Shadow's body seemed limp. My dad rushed him to a spot on the street inside our street, close to some mailboxes, and set him down on the ground. I saw my dad on his knees, and I ran over to where he was, only to have my dad yell at me to not come any closer, that he didn't want me seeing Shadow like this. I saw my dad was crying, and he was crying pretty hard. I stared at the limp body of my cat on the ground, and I see blood on the ground near his face, and then it clicks into my head and I know what happened.

My dad stares at me, torn between letting me see or not, then finally tells me to come closer, and he asks me, "It's Shadow, isn't it?" I look at the body briefly, and I nod. It is. There's no mistaking the way Shadow's black fur looked, and the single-strands of random white fur that stuck out in some areas in his black fur, or the way his white feet looked. I recognized his feet right away. There's no mistaking the white fur on Shadow's chest and belly. It'd be hard for me to deny that it was Shadow alright that was lying on the ground with a bloody mouth.

My dad tells me that he'd been hit by a car, that he must have been trying to get home. He says that Shadow's body is still warm, and that his heart had still been beating when he had picked him up. He'd been hit that recently.

And all of this before we have to go to school.
As you can imagine....I was a bit distressed during the school day, though I only REALLY started to cry hard during 5th period, 'cause at that point was when guilt was sinking in, I guess. Guilt that we hadn't found him yesterday, that we hadn't searched as well as we should have, and that if we had, we might have found him, and this wouldn't have happened. It's still upsetting to me that we didn't find him before this. And now my poor Shadow-kitty is gone.

The thing that strikes me as odd, though.....is that, thinking back at it, Shadow went missing shortly after he and my cat Neferdy got into a fight (a literal cat fight, where Neferdy was kicking Shadow's butt for starting a cat fight with Polar). I...get the strangest feeling that Shadow might have purposely left because of that, or maybe he was just scared of Neferdy now, or at the moment, or something.... ~.>

But anyway....I drew this pic during 6th period, 'cause I felt like drawing something in memory of my cat. It actually looks a lot like him, minus the feet area, 'cause I suck at that part when drawing animals like cats and foxes and such. You can see why I named him "Shadow." The way his white chest/belly fur looked reminded me of Shadow the Hedgehog, so I thought it seemed appropriate.

But anyways......that's about it. I was looking through my pics, and I happened across some photos that were on my computer of my cat Shadow when he was younger, so I think I'll get to posting those photos soon, when I have the time.

But yeah, that's it.

Rest in Peace, Shadow~