Two INCREDIBLY SAD songs about a cat (by the Weakerthans)

I've had cats most of my life, but I feel very differently (and much more strongly) toward the two that my partner and I adopted back in May 2015. I don't even know for sure why this is--some combination of their (wonderful) personalities and the stage of my life, maybe? Whatever the reason for it is, though, I feel like I would go to ridiculous lengths to make sure that these two are happy in a way that I didn't feel toward any of my previous cats (even though I dearly loved the others as well).

There have been all sorts of strange repercussions from this. Like, I find that I have a certain reluctance to travel if my partner is going to be going along, because I'm worried that my cats will be unhappy if left alone. I even feel a little guilty if I'm going to be spending my "work from home day" in the office (I usually have one day a week arranged so that I don't have to go in, but sometimes I do). And I find myself reacting differently than I would have before to certain kinds of stories--like, I found myself crying at the remake of Pete's Dragon because of the way that the dragon had to discover that not all humans were like his human Pete, and that there were humans who wished him harm. I kept thinking about how I never wanted my cats to go through that discovery, and the very idea of it made me desperately sad. All this is new to me, and very strange.

Anyway, the actual point of this post is my discovery this week of two songs written from the point of view of a cat by the Winnipeg-based group The Weakerthans. The first one is Plea from a Cat Named Virtute, and it's about a cat dealing with an owner who has mental health issues. The second one is called Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure, and it's the sequel, about the cat running away from home because things got so bad. They're both sad, but while the first one is just kind of "god, that's sad," the second one is so much a punch in the gut that I haven't been able to bring myself to even read the lyrics all the way through (and the one time I tried to listen to it, I had to turn it off in the middle). It made me want to hug my cats and say their names to them over and over again. :(