The Cat Burglar

0:01 To the restless, the insomniacs, the stressed out, the overwork the doom scrollers, the worried, and the board. This is for you. Good writing is meant to make you think. This is the opposite. Sure funny and unfortunately true stories that have mostly to do with nothing to help you turn off your brain and turn on your ram. All names have been changed to protect the guilty. These are anxiety addicts bedtime stories.

0:44 Lisette was going through it like that. It was a breakup that was like a bomb in the mouth of a ground squirrel who dug a tunnel deep into her heart before letting it explode. Yeah, apologies, that is a disgusting visual for time. The squirrel left the heartbreak bomb and climbed out before the timer went off and blew the squirrel's guts everywhere. It was one of those soul crushing experiences that leaves you breaft of strength, the ability to keep tears of bay, the capability in believing you will ever get over it, and the heartbreak showed itself everywhere. It showed itself in her work. She could barely focus. As a data analyst for a construction equipment company, one would not exactly describe her days as chock full of excitement, but they did require concentration and attention to detail, both skills which had been zapped from her brain in the twenty four hours since Amos unceremoniously left her while she was working late on a Monday. She'd been working her tail off lately, only occasionally giving herself a brain break by logging onto her favorite Facebook group, the post it Note.

1:49 The Pit Pit was started by a friend of a friend outside of the city and had grown to about one hundred members and consisted of all women in their twenties trying to tame the wild beasts of the Chicago dating scene. Lisette had been a member before she met Amos. She loved the sass, the camaraderie, and the others in similar relationship situations. She'd asked advice from the group a handful of times about her current romantic life. Amos had been living with her for six months. He made her feel smart, I loved, and beautiful about seventy five percent of the time. When he was good. He was so good he'd make dinner and bring home flowers and dote on her in front of her friends. But when he was tired or hungry, or someone had cut in front of him at Dark Matter Coffee, the guy would explode like a can of soda in the freezer, and for the life of her, Lisette couldn't decide which one of the Amoses she lived with was the real Amos. Even with all of her expertise, this was a challenging set of data for her to analyze. While sitting in front of her double monitor at eight o'clock that night and missing a new Judge Judy episode, Lisette had explicitly won out loud because the office was empty. What could be worse than having to work this late on a Monday?

3:07 She would learn an hour and a half later after getting home, the answer was getting dumped your boyfriend, moving out all of his stuff and leaving you with a handwritten letter that explained absolutely nothing. As Lisa sat on the gray paneled faux wood floor of her kitchen, where she had melted into a puddle of devastation after picking up the yellow leugal pad with Amos's state of their union, she cried out loud yet again, what could be worse than getting dumped on a Monday while you're working late? And this is when she learned two facts of life. One, don't ever say that sentence out loud. There's no good answer. Two. This is when she noticed that she hadn't seen Manners, her fluffy orange rescue cat, since she got home and became intimately acquainted with her kitchen flooring manners. She screamed like an old Victorian society ly whose child picked up the wrong fork. The apartment was silent for less than a second. The round white speaker that Amos had forgotten to steal spoke back almost immediately. I'm sorry I didn't quite catch that. Did you mean table etiquette? Fuck you?

4:14 Alexa list ripped the device out of the wall and threw it in the recycling bin, with no confidence that that's where it belonged. She'd always hated that thing. It wasn't just that she was minorly paranoid and didn't want Amazon listening. It was the quiet, but nagging feeling that Amos wanted somebody else around that Lisette wasn't quite enough for him. It wasn't like she was jealous of Alexa. That would be insane, but that's how Amos could make her feel twenty five percent of the time like a nutball, envious of a well programmed plastic speaker Manners Manners, she cried now that the futuristic gadget was no longer spying on her. This time she was met with silence, not a yew or a purr or a hairball to step in.

4:58 After an entire hour of searching a six hundred square foot apartment, Lisett was hit with the reality of her reality. Not only had she been forced to work late fixing her coworker's mistake, but she had been dumped by the best looking guy she'd ever dated, and she'd fucking stolen her cat. And Manners, of course, wasn't just a cat. He was her evening footwarmer, her fellow Real Housewives fan, her secret keeper, her fluffy friend, her goofy Gooferson. He had a lot of nicknames. The heartbreak was momentarily replaced with defiant indignation that was not Amos's cat. There was no question about whom Manners really belonged to. If the two of them went in front of Judge Judy, Amos wouldn't have a case, not even close. Lisette was the one who wanted a cat in the first place, who would follow the local adoption center on Instagram had seen the Little Orange litter, contacted the office, arranged a meeting, and even allowed one of their volunteers to come in and evaluate her hertment. Lisette had filled out the lengthy paperwork, paid the adoption fee, and purchased all of the matching feline necessitated accessories at home goods, including an intricate cat jungle gym. Fine Amos had put together the jungle gym, but he'd had four beers and lost one of the pages of directions during the assembly process. This meant that every time poor Manners climbed up to the top rung of the kiddy play structure, his weight caused the platform to flop to one side. He never remembered and fell

6:29 on his cat ass multiple times a day, disproving the theory that his kind always landed on their feet. Judy would have had a field day with that one. Lisette's sobs were momentarily paused while she considered taking Amos to the Court TV show, but she knew she couldn't. She was missing something, and not just Manners. She was missing proof. She had been watching Judge Judy since her mom went back to work full time. And her elderly neighbor, missus Hoppin babysatter after school. She knew the drill. She felt like she knew that law. In fact, she briefly considered law school solely based on her love for the daytime sharp tongue judge, but quickly realized that her conflict avoidant personality probably wouldn't be the best fit for that line of work. Still, she was angry. She called Amos. It went to voicemail. After three rings, she texted, how could you do this to me? There was no answer. A thought ripped through her stomach, as if she were being stabbed.

7:26 Who isn't There has to be someone else. His letter of romantic resignation was a single paragraph. He'd written that he felt like he was holding me set back, he wanted more for her, and then there was the last line, I'm just not ready for someone who's ready. Fuck. It was clear, even to heartbrokenly set that this was a steaming pile of Horseshit curled up on her ikea couch, Lisett pulled Amos's Blackhawk's hoodie out of the laundry hamper because she was angry but also confused. Her rejected lonely, not to mention, hungry, thirsty, bloated, itchy, and feeling abandoned.

8:08 While she streamed an old Judged Judy episode that she'd seen maybe seven times, she mindlessly opened the Facebook app on her phone, and there it was a safe place to let it rip. Pouring her heart out to kind of strangers on the Internet felt wildly cathartic, and putting Amos's personality in writing Wow. It didn't take long for Lisette to stop thinking of him as the one who dumped her, but as the bullet she had very recently dodged. He was a sloppy, small minded jerk. He lived his life as if li Set were a goldfish who occasionally needed minimal care and some weekly sustenance. He'd often made her feel like she was in his way when it was legally her apartment. He wondered out loud why she didn't have those long, sexy nails like the girls he saw at the gym where he was a personal trainer, and could not wrap his head around the fact that a person cannot spend eight hours a day type on a keyboard and also maintain a three inch appendage to each fingertip. The more leaset type, the more her anger exploded through her thumbs and onto the fresh screen space.

9:11 Right when you're angry, but never send until you're calm, her father had often told her. But Lisett was not in the headspace to heed any kind of advice, and just to double down before she posted her rant, she uploaded a photo of Amos, just in case there was anyone in the chat presently lying next to the not ready for someone who was ready X. Immediately in her post exorcism state, a wave of exhaustion crashed over her. It was eleven PM that night, Like a drunk girl home from a club. At four am, Lisette fell asleep without washing off her makeup, brushing her teeth, or charging her phone. But poor Lisett was hideously sober, and to add insult to injury, she overslept the next morning, not hearing her alarm. She rushed to work, of course, in the pouring rain without a rubber boots, and found herself so inundated with emails and revisions to her documents that she didn't get to check or recharge her phone until almost five o'clock that afternoon, and that's when she saw a post from someone named Vanessa. Vanessa was a regular contributor to the Facebook group. She was twenty eight, so a bit older than Lisa, and arguably quite a bit more street smart. She'd been sort of around the block and was one of the few group members wholly uninterested in a long term relationship. She was completing her medical residency by, according to her profile, always going beyond what is asked of me, and thought men were more of a liability than anything else. However, she did like some

10:42 company a few times a month and always posted detailed reviews of her conquests. So maybe it should not have been a surprise to Lisa that Vanessa knew Amos. But she was so emotionally drained that moly was girl, wrote Vanessa, under the dozens of other comments about Amos's unceremonious dumping, I know him. I'll hit him up, get myself invited over and see if he has a cat. The post got eighty eight likes, which at that point in time was the gross majority of the group's members list shook her head. Along with manners, Amos had also stolen all of Lisette's hope. She was exhausted, irritable, and not thinking straight.

11:27 If she had been, she would have taken a closer look at Vanessa's profile. Pick then she would have realized that there were very few straight men in their twenties in the city of Chicago that would have turned down Vanessa. So when the week finally dragged itself to the end, Lisette wasn't surprised that she hadn't gotten any news. She worked late every night. There were endless problems with the latest analysis of the construction. Company was undergoing some major changes, and it seemed like management was being impossible at respecting her numbers. On top of the work stress, there was nothing waiting for her at home, no food in the fridge, no boyfriend in bed, and most painfully of all, no fuzzy orange cat waiting to greet her at the door.

12:07 It was almost too much for Lisett to bear. That Friday, she ignored the group text hashing out weekend plans. The idea of going out and being social was wholly unappealing. She put her phone on silent, determined to get her work done so she could commit to rotting on her couch all weekend. It wasn't until she finally got home at seven pm, when the sky was pitched black, the city buzzing with people looking having or about to have a good time when she pulled out the Black Hawk's hoodie. Yes, she knows, she knows, she knows. She couldn't help herself, plopped in front of the TV and opened up Facebook. There was nothing. She turned on her DVR and watched four hours of Judge Judy reruns, falling asleep on the stiffly made sofa, but she never turned her notifications back on.

12:54 If she had, she would have woken up before eleven am the next day, because when the set did pry herself up off the couch late that Saturday morning, it took her quite a bit of time to make herself a coffee and oatmeal and then actually check her phone. Maybe it was good that her device had been on silence. There were six hundred and fifty two notifications. Oh my god, what, Lisa shrieked to absolutely no one, not even Alexa, who was still sitting in the recycling bin in the twelve hours that our heroin had been asleep. Here's what happened. Vanessa did, in fact meet up with Amos for drinks.

13:36 She got herself invited back to his apartment took a minor detour by having sex with him for an hour. Remember, if you can ignore all the red flags, Amos was a very very good looking douw and while he was deeply asleep after the romp in the hay, Vanessa had trolled around his apartment and found the cat manners. Lisa cried out loud, surprising even herself. Vanessa had taken a picture of the kitty crouched on top of Amos's refrigerator. This was proof. This was Judge Judy certifiable proof. Amos had stolen her cat. Lisette's heart swelled before it dropped down the tunnel that led to her stomach that the ground squirrel had carved out when she first got dumped. Now, what what was she going to do? Was she going to like camp outside of his door on the sidewalk, demanding that he let her in to get her cat.

14:30 That would be miserable. He might not do it. Was she supposed to muscle past one hundred and eighty pound grown man, and oh my god, how deeply humiliating. Lisett scrolled through the comments. Apparently with the news of the cat caper, the group had exploded overnight. The hundred or so original members now numbered over a thousand, and everyone was cheering for Lisette and Vanessa. Comment after comment lifted Lisette's spirits incrementally until she found herself with a heart full when she got to the bottom of the page. And that's when she saw the photo, and her heart had no idea what to do. It was a selfie taken in front of the dry cleaners, the one right next door to Amos's apartment. It was time stamped at six twelve am. Vanessa was smiling, her makeup a bit smudged, her hair show and a girl who had recently had a very good time. And underneath her left armpit was a canvas trader Joe's shopping bag that Lisa also recognized as being hers, with you guessed it, Manners's head sticking out.

15:36 The caption read got them girl? Where do you want to meet? What the oh? Vanessa had been true to her profile and gone another step further than was asked of her. Instead of just finding the cat, she'd stolen the cat and now she wanted to deliver Manners in her stolen grocery bag right back to Lasette. The tears that poured out of Lisette's eyes could have filled Manners's water bowl. She typed furiously, jolted awake out of her eleven hour sleep. Vanessa responded right away and agreed to meet at the Gaslight Coffee Roasters in between their two apartments. While on the bus with her empty cat carrier, Lisette felt her phone vibrate over and over and over in her pocket. The Facebook group had grown again, doubling in size since Vanessa posted the selfie. The members were excited, engaged, and super super invested. Lisat had no idea how to respond.

16:32 She was suddenly famous, sort of. When she got off the bus and saw Vanessa and Manners, she broke down into tears for the hundredth time that week, but for the first time out of happiness. The two women exchanged the cat, compared notes, and laughed at the social media group that had ballooned in the last twenty four hours. Now Lisette knew how to respond. She posted a picture of herself, Vanessa, and Manners sitting together outside the coffee shop. She captioned it two girls, one guy, and nothing to do with Amos. The sentence that came in immediately was the most perfect sentence ever written. In the history of an all girl Facebook dating group. It was even better than a Judge Judy sentence written by a girl that neither Liset or Vanessa or Manners had ever met. It read, and now twenty seven hundred and fifty women who will also want nothing to do with him. For the first time all week, Lissett's face stretched into an enormous smile in the most unexpected way possible. Justice was served. Good Night, Sweet Dreams, and please subscribe, like follow us on all the platforms. We're here for you two nights a week.

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