BerryBamblz - Cats

Beyla

Beyla my absolute beloved. My shining star. My sweet kitty who could never do anything wrong ever and who I love so much.

We first got Beyla in 2020, days before the COVID lockdown hit. The shelter had her name listed as Feather. A dilute-tortie with a dot in the center of her forehead, we asked to see her in the interaction room almost immediately.

We were told by the shelter workers that Feather was a 3 year old stray who'd been with them for 4 months. It was early March at the time, so it didn't take much to realize she'd been held up in a small cage all through the coldest months of the year. Watching countless others coming and going all while she remained.

The reason that such a young, beautiful cat like her hadn't gotten adopted was because she was FIV positive. Essentially she had a compromised immune system, and nobody so far had been up to the task of caring for something that might require additional care. My entire household is disabled. We understood what it meant to be cast aside as too much of a burden for health issues you couldn't control.

Beyla cost us a total of $5: $0 for the cat herself, and $5 for the carrier we brought her home in. We'd come in that day just wanting to look around after the recent passing of my childhood cat so needless to say my mother's at the time boyfriend waiting for us at home was quite surprised.

Beyla spent the first couple hours in her new home hiding underneath my bed. We gave her space of course. Being in a new unfamiliar place with new unfamiliar smells with no way to go back to your old familiar sterile cage was understandably overwhelming.

For the first day Beyla only ever peeked out from underneath my bed when I leaned down to look at her. She'd come closer and let me pet her, but the moment I stopped she went right back under. That was okay.

Nowadays, Beyla is an affectionate, loving gal who's got a little bit of sass to her, but in the early days she was pretty closed off. She let us pet her of course, but sitting in laps or sleeping near us was out of the equation. It took until I got a fever in 2022 for her to realize that sitting on top of human = warmth, and that she liked warmth. She's been doing it ever since.

Overall, Beyla is a cat I wouldn't trade for the world, and there's so much more I want to ramble about her here but for the sake of my own sanity I'm going to leave at just this for now. I'll probably come back through and add more at some point though. Because I love Beyla and Beyla loves me.