cimorene

Tristana has been very brave and is obviously trying to push past her anxiety deliberately - she came and sat on my lap the other day when she knew Sipuli was under the duvet next to my feet, and she's come creeping into the livingroom when she knows Sipuli is free in the house several times.

Over the weekend Sipuli decided to stage a protest of cat divorce - she has been sleeping with Wax in the diningroom and I've been sleeping in our bedroom with Tristana (Tristana got the larger amount of house territory there but I spent a very long time on the less-comfortable futon in the dining room over the last two years). When we started letting her out in the daytime, she started burrowing under the duvet in our bed and napping there all day. On Friday I had to forcibly remove her from the room so that Tristana (hiding on top of the bookcase) would feel able to come down and leave the room to have her dinner, and Sipuli got her feelings hurt I guess and then Saturday she refused to come out of our bed for dinner. She stayed until Wax carried her down at bedtime and shut her in the diningroom.

Yesterday, though, she came into the livingroom after eating her dinner, where Tristana had had the sofa to herself the past two days, and Approached the Sofa. Tristana was sitting between us on the sofa and Sipuli jumped onto the arm of the sofa and Tristana hissed at her, but instead of immediately retreating Sipuli maintained eye contact and sat there and they both growled gently at each other for a while until Sipuli awkwardly batted one paw at Tristana and retreated. She came back after a few minutes to try to find a place on the sofa, but she didn't want to sit on Wax's lap because Wax cruelly refused to remove the laptop from her knee, which made the remaining space rather cramped; and Tristana was on my lap under a blanket so she couldn't sit there. She gave up after a bit. (I felt sorry for her, but Tristana was more upset by the whole thing: she stayed there as if frozen in the same position and kept growling after Sipuli left for a while. We were petting her and soothing her and she wasn't growling AT us, but she was still growling even though Sipuli wasn't there until we covered her up with a blanket. Poor anxious bean.)

Artist's interpretation of the Events on the Sofa of 22 September

We were really hoping to be able to at least spend the evenings in the same room, but we were perhaps pushing them too hard. Tristana is perhaps too autistic, or too traumatized by living in the house with Anubis for such a long time - it really was a very long time, almost half the time she's been alive. Today she was lurking on the landing after dinnertime when Sipuli came into the hall downstairs and said "Mrow? Mrow?" and Tristana hissed at her and ran away upstairs... and Sipuli followed her instead of running away as well. It's the first time she's done that! And that's just what we don't want to happen because it makes Tristana more frightened. In this case evidently Sipuli was not being aggressive, just curious: she didn't try to attack her, and we think didn't even touch her, just followed her into the bathroom, then ran away when Tristana hissed and hid behind the shower curtain. Sipuli is back in isolation for a few days, at least. And so I'm back in the dining room for the latter half of the evening, because I felt too guilty to leave her in there alone in order to sit with Wax in the livingroom.