Last week Isis escaped and I don’t think I’ll ever see her again. She disappeared out of my partially open bedroom window at around 4am in the morning. Said window was open to let in air but, I believed, to narrow for either for my feline companions. Alas this wasn’t the case and I was woken at 4:30am by Ceri crying out. At first I assumed she had fallen out of the window but no she was there. Perhaps she’d been something like a rat or another kitteh? Nope. 

Then I realised: where was Mama Isis? She wasn’t on the chair, her normal spot or outside on the ground where you’d expect a cat to land. I went outside and called to her nothing, then tore the house apart checking she wasn’t hiding in her normal spots. So I leashed up Ce-chan and headed outside, taking her round all the places a cat might explore. Still nothing. Then I just stood at the door waiting and hoping as night turned into dawn.

By eight I was knocking on doors, by ten Ce-chan was once again leashed and we started looking. Afterwards, shattered, I tried to get some sleep only for the neighbourhood kids to knock on my door and tell me they had seen her. She was over on the other side of my estate about three minutes away and I’m so sure it was her. Her red collar is a specific shade of scarlet that makes it unmissable, even if I couldn’t get close enough to grab/check it was her. Unfortunately the noise of the kiddies scared her off into the bushes and that was it. She was never one to respond to her name (I always called her ‘Mama’) unless dinner was involved and by the end of the day I was in a state, my nerves shredded thanks to kids seeing Isis in every blackish cat who crossed their paths.

Ce-chan was also in a state, crying for her mother and she soon latched onto me, despite trying to escape whilst on the lead or in her travel box as I took her round in a last ditch attempt to use her to track her mother. On Sunday morning I started putting flyers through the letter boxes of every person on the site … by Monday, I was doing it on lamp posts with little notes … I called both vets in town in case she came in and Cats Protection … on Tuesday I expanded my search to include the houses with big gardens on South Green where all the cats seem to wander. By Thursday I started thinking logically and put flyers through the doors of the houses on Lynn Hill which back directly onto the ditch and today … well today I have no choice but to sob my eyes out. 

Each morning I’ve been out at the crack of dawn calling for her. I’ve had some sightings, some with potential, others just other cats. One lovely woman waited twelves hours to ring me to say she’d seen my cat, waking me up at the crack of dawn to tell me about a sighting the previous day at 2:30pm. I’ve run around in my PJs with a cat box in hand at the hope this call might be the one. I’ve spoken to so many people and begged them to keep an eye out for beloved cat. Trying to impress upon that that while she might be black, she has this collar and beautiful green eyes and weird white eyebrows with this baldness tracking to her ears.

Everyone keeps looking for her but with my eyes I’m no use. I know she’s probably laying low during the day, somewhere close, prefering instead to come out during twilight. Each night I stand at my door and call to her in the hope she might just come back. I love her to bits but it seems obvious she wanted to go. I just can’t eat or sleep or thing anymore, I just want her back and I’m so scared I’ll never see her again.

And so, here we are. It’s Friday morning and my brain is frozen. I just don’t know what to do anymore and yet I feel like I’ve not done enough. I haven’t put an ad in the paper, I’ve not spoken to enough people, I’ve not been as descriptive as I could be with the flyers, I should have offered a reward even though I have no money, I should have done colour ones … it goes on and one. So now I am being told to grieve for her, I don’t even know if I can do that. She is my kitteh child and I feel like I’m some how neglegent if I don’t keep looking, either until I collapse or she reappears.

I just want Mama Isis to back.