FRANKIE

21 GRAMS OF RELATION

Before Frankie died I was never sure whether I was waking up or going to sleep. Her absence was an organising discipline for my life.

‘Frankie..?’ - then a thought and immediately safe harbour of soul was achieved. If I knew she was ok; It was ok.

Some mornings shed be foul-eyed at me having been raised out of warm space by an alarm that signalled by dash to the airport for a flight to somewhere. Those mornings she didn’t get up to see me off but on weekend when she got moving she trotted round as though gravity was negotiable beneath her feet. The space was already hers.

Cats are the best mates in winter and so too our friendship peaked just upon Autumn’s dawn. The trees shedding yellow and us aussies looking for a thicker fold in bedding.

The air turned.

The first cold settling into the house,

That was usually when she would slip beneath the covers finding narrow hollow between body and mattress, and a temporary architecture of warmth that only exists when two forms agree to share it. She would press in, small and absolute, and remain there as if it were the most natural configuration of the world.

And over time, it became so.

Her inclinations shaped my invitations. I adjusted without noticing. Moved without deciding. Woke before she stepped. Stilled before she settled. There was no communication in the way we pretend to understand it—no language, no instruction, no negotiation.

But something was happening.

Something precise.

When I look at her now - in the photos that remain - I see it more clearly than I did at the time. The light catches her eye in exactly the same way each time, a kind of quiet intensity that is neither curiosity nor indifference and between that spark of where she looked and the thing that she gazed out toward, something emerged too.

Its as true as we are.

And it is as absurd as snow at the beach.

For fifteen years, she was my first signal.

She died. I promised I would always come back for her and she died in my arms.

Death happens to life.

And so there are poems and tears and rituals of kinetic compression to squeeze something so vast into something that could be carried without breaking.

I still feel uninterested in a world without that gaze.

But it has only been now that Ive even been strong enough to pick up a pen and write about the sheer whole that lives inside me.

Because now I understand not that I had lost her but that I had lost that which existed in relation to her - the who, how, why, what, where and when - every question I asked of myself and the complete answer that she made.

Wherever that was and wherever that lived, it was not contained within either of us.

It was not my mind and paws meeting hers meows and hands, it was something else.

Something I felt, something she touched, and something that we could neither see on our own.

THE COLLAPSE

Montaigne once asked:

“When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me?”

It is, at first glance, a charming question. Like too many of Montaigne’s questions, it lingers longer than it ought.

I had never been drawn to it despite my fascination and adoration for the man. The only time Frankie had to survive a lagging without me was when I went to Europe on suspicion that if I visited his castle I might find a clue or two.

I always saw it as a question of knowledge or certainty; of the epistemic humility required to imagine the unknowable interior of another creature?

Recently my thinking changed. Because its also an inversion offered not to resolve anything, but to unsettle the quiet arrogance with which we assume ourselves to be the primary agent in every interaction we enter. And we aren’t. In fact, we aren’t even real to be plain and direct.

Thinking about the question you can see a tidy argument here: assign agency in both directions, distribute intentionality evenly, and arrive at a kind of polite symmetry in which both parties are granted their due. But the more you sit with that thinking, the more it begins to feel like a misdirection.

More insufficient than wrong i suppose. Because it assumes without announcement a duality or binary meaning in life. And while that is true, it is also trivially true.

There is I. Yes. There is Frankie. Yep. And of course there is also the play, which it seems isnt actually a thing unless you mix us together or at least whose meaning is constituted by something passing between us. What did we pass and how did knowing get shared. How did she feel my care? How did I sense her trust? Can that be accounted for or owned by either of us?

And while it was always at least necessarily yes for one of us, it doesn’t resolve how one of us got there anyway.

Who plays whom?

How much is my intention, how relevant her mood and response that ensues? Is that the space where meaning first emerges and which is almost certainly not easy to view for render.

It’s nice to think of Frankie as I confront the challenge of AI. What prospect lies here? Not over there or over here but right here. Because that space is the fertile ground that the pioneers in AI all now plough. (Russ Palmer deserving of a shout for his early work on this)

Sometimes we return to questions not because of their posture but due their currency and correlation to circumstance.

If there can be no play without a place for play to be then where is it that play might be?

And here, without quite intending to, Montaigne’s question opens into something far less modest than it first appeared.

For if we cannot say, with any certainty, who is playing whom—

Then we may also have to ask whether we should be convinced of the determinism that has made order within the scientific world.

The deeper truth is quieter, and far less interested in who is doing what to whom:

It was neither that I was playing with her, nor she with me. It was only that we were playing.

My grief made manageable not as a memory of poetic flourish - but as an ontological claim.

GRIEF

She died in my arms in the chaos of animal emergency. A tumor had struck her appetite and when poor medication caused bleeding in her lungs her system wilted. They kept her stable, but at 3am I learned it was really only pallative care from there on.

The choice i had was whether i would let her die an unforecast death with pain and choking and discomfort. Before choosing I asked her what she wanted.

‘What do you want to do, hey?’ I whispered.

She struggled to reach out to my arms and scamper weakly ‘away’; toward home with me. But she couldnt really survive the carry.

I accepted this as a sign to choose peace and lost my frame inside our joined comfort as the bet administered.

This was our last space together.

I whispered to her the same thing i whispered every night ‘love you darling. ill always come back for you.’

She didnt really die arms as much as part of us died together.

What rich grief.

What wet and blackened soil for my emptiness to take root in.

What am I without us?