Dec '25 • General discussion
My Partial Chapter 1
I'm almost finished writing Chapter One of my memoir. Since I wanted to show you what I'm doing and how I'm doing, I thought I would post part of my first chapter here. I will post my outline as Shawn instructs in his Wordsmith manual for feedback once I've finished that. But I wanted to draft the chapter first so I can get an idea of where it's headed. So here it is:
The Cat Who Returned Through the Clouds
Have you ever wished upon a star? Has the cosmos ever answered your prayer?
A long time ago, I made a wish—not on a star, but on the wind. It was an ordinary day in Colorado, the air thin, the light bright, the mountains quietly watching. I made the wish offhandedly and let it go like a leaf on a stream, without ceremony, one small thought among the countless thoughts that crossed my mind.
Some five years later, long after I’d forgotten it, the wish found its way back to me.
A miracle for someone like me who stumbled through life as if I didn’t have eyes to see nor ears to hear. I always felt unsure, unmoored. I remember once a group therapist told us that people like us—adult children of dysfunctional families—needed advice more than most.
But didn’t everyone?
I often suspected the human race had been sculpted by an unskilled potter with poor aim. Dysfunction wasn’t the exception—it was the design. If advice were the cure, the entire world needed a prescription.
At the time, I was living in California, in Silicon Valley, in that unsettled state that feels like being mid-step on a staircase: not on the floor below, not yet on the floor above. I rented a room from a friend until I found my own apartment. It was then that I met the man who would become my husband—a quiet software engineer named John.
A psychic once told me I’d meet someone like him, but by then I treated predictions like weather reports from another planet. I consulted psychics only because I didn’t know what else to do. Therapists weren’t remotely helpful either. At least, psychics were cheaper, more time efficient, and occasionally, comforting. Still, none of them had steered my life in any sort of meaningful way. John did that simply by showing up.
After some more detours coming and going, I finally moved into his one-story house with its four modest bedrooms and two bathrooms. I squeezed a desk and computer into the tiniest room and settled into my usual routines: reading, checking my email, procrastinating. Life became a series of small, predictable moves. I felt content and yet at the same time, vaguely adrift.
I had no idea that the next leap was already in motion, thousands of miles away, with a cat who couldn’t see me.
One afternoon, on a whim, I logged into Facebook. And there it was. A message from Courtney.
I remembered her instantly. The younger sister of my old housemate in Boulder. Pretty, thoughtful, a photographer and aspiring psychotherapist. And the guardian of a cat I had fallen in love without meaning to, in the way you sometimes do with beings who carry visible scars and invisible resilience. Her cat Lydia was blind, albino, and hearing-impaired cat. More importantly, she dispensed something altogether different than predictions nor prescriptions—not instruction, but an invitation. I didn’t know that yet.
“Would you like to have Lydia?” her message said.
She and her boyfriend were getting serious and moving in together, she explained. He was severely allergic to cats, and despite their best efforts, he simply couldn’t live with one. Thus, Courtney had made the painful decision to rehome Lydia. Several people were eager to adopt her cat, but no one, she said, had been as close to Lydia as I had been. She wanted to ask me first.
I stared at the screen in shock.
It felt as if I’d won a lottery for which I had never bought a ticket.
The wish that I had spoken years ago—softly, privately, almost childishly—was that one day Lydia might be mine. Not through tragedy, not through heartbreak, I specified to the unlistening air, but through some happy turn of events I couldn’t yet imagine.
I hadn’t shaped my desire into affirmations or visualizations. Once I released it, I forgot about it. The wish dissolved into the background of all the other things I thought I wanted and didn’t get. By the time it found its way back to me, I no longer believed in wishes at all.
Now, in a small bedroom in Silicon Valley, the wish was knocking at my digital door.
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My Partial Chapter 1
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