Everyone has made a small mistake before; maybe it was not picking something up, leaving something open, or not closing it. Well, one time when I made one small mistake it turned into one of the biggest mistakes in my life.

As my father and I returned from a phenomenal soccer match, we walked into our house to find it like a deserted ghost town. I realized I had forgotten to close the door to the backyard before leaving for the game, but I shrugged the feeling off. Still, I realized that only two of my three cats could be found downstairs. I was now wondering where the third cat, Itty Bitty, was, but soon I would find out myself. My dad called me, and I bolted up the stairs like a raccoon finding a trash can and found both my parents in a little part of our backyard, looking up at a 40-foot gigantic tree, like a meteor was coming right at them ready to strike the planet. But what I found stunned me.

My cat went up the tree relatively near the top. My parents said a fox pursued my cat up the tree and now was stuck. While I was looking up the tree, my stepmom called and tried to get someone to help get our cat down from the tree. After what felt like an eternity, she found someone that could get the cat down. He swiftly ran like a cheetah to the backyard, getting the explanation from my parents. Then got his gear ready to clamber up the tree.

Itty Bitty found herself forty feet high in the towering tree, where the pine seemed to scrape the sky. As the rescuer made one last-ditch attempt to reach Itty Bitty, his efforts proved to be futile. The skittish kitten lost her grasp and expeditiously plummeted through the thick boughs until her slim body met the ground. My heart stopped. My hope was dwindling. We hastily blitzed to the car like we were Olympic runners with Itty Bitty resting in my dad’s arms, hopping in the car. While in the car I gushed with tears, and Itty Bitty kept chomping on my dad’s finger, and then…the chomping stopped. Itty Bitty went limp. That’s when we knew that Itty Bitty had died.

Then we sorrowfully coiled home in our car. We walked out of our car, mourning Itty Bitty’s death. We got to our backyard and my dad said, “Let’s bury Itty Bitty under the treehouse.” Reluctantly and mourningly, I agreed, and we got our shovel and penetrated the dirt to put Itty Bitty in a shoebox and return the dirt to the earth. Then we finished and sluggishly went back inside the house, saying nothing. But the deep thoughts inside me remained. I thought that it was my fault for leaving the door open in the morning and that it was me to blame for the death of my cat.     

When my cat died I blamed myself, but I reminded myself that my cat had gotten out a lot of times before this. Eventually, I moved on from this tragedy and stopped blaming myself for my cat’s death.  It wasn’t easy, and it caused me great pain and suffering to move on. But finally, the inescapable thoughts washed away like a bottle in the ocean. Sometimes we all make mistakes, but moving forward is the only way to live.

 

 

 

-Cruz S.