My best friend when I moved across the country was my cat. That may sound a tad lonely, but it really wasn't anywhere near as bad as it sounds.

I never expected my cat to mean so much to me when I first got him as a tiny kitten. It was kind of a last minute, completely unexpected thing. One of my friends' relatives found an abandoned litter underneath the stairs leading up to her apartment. Not only did someone throw a helpless cat into the street, but their heart was so cold they threw her five two month old kittens to the curb as well. When I finally heard about him, I had no intention of actually adopting him. It wasn't until a few weeks later, after attempting to help my friends find them all homes, that I finally caved. All the others had been adopted long before and when I heard they had named Loki, I knew that I had no choice but to take him.

Two months later, I had moved in with one of my good friends. Her mom and I picked him up and brought him back in the dead of night. Loki spent 2 months in Pennsylvania while I prepped to move across the country, bonding with their two cats.

You would think that the flight from East coast to West coast would have been the most exciting part of his kitten life, however at merely 6 months, he had a pretty close brush with death. The only other member of my tiny family had a severe allergic reaction to one of his vaccines and reached a temperature of nearly 105 degrees- high enough to give him some minor brain damage. I hadn't realized how much this little ball of fur meant to me until I almost lost him- and willingly wiped my savings to keep him around.

Recently, I was reading a study in the Behavioural Processes journal on the bond between cats and their owners and as any cat owner would understand, the results seemed to indicate that cats and their respective humans have a much more complex bond than was thought to exist before. After studying 40 pairs of humans and their respective cats, the researchers concluded that human/cat relationships are surprisingly (or, rather, unsurprisingly, if you have a cat) similar in complexity to relationships that humans form with other humans. In other words, I'm not a crazy cat lady- I just have a really good relationship with my cat.