Transition in Tooth and Claw

This article explores the transition from living with a partner for sixteen years to suddenly living on one’s own halfway across the country. While the move logically made sense for several reasons, the author found themselves not being able to shake the feeling that something was wrong. Feeling sensations that at first excited them, and then terrified them (complete silence, stifled loneliness, increased anxiety), they search for how to cope in the new space they are calling home. Recalling how in Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language and Sensation Debra Hawhee noted that rhetoricians spoke of nonhuman animals “when sensations matter most, thereby bringing rhetoric to its—or the—senses,”1 the author parallels their adjustment to that of their cat, Berkeley. Through allowing their senses to be seen in the alogos, they validate the embodiment of change and embrace how texts on nonhuman animals “may begin in a metaphorical register, but they soon exceed it.”2 The article will contain mixed autoethnographic methods, including some historical positioning (such as connections with the “crazy cat lady” trope), a poetic interjection, and vignettes of/with their cat.