Skittles has been with us for two and a half months now. She still
does not trust me, though some progress has been made. She’s been
reunited with her mother and her sister, which is wonderful to see. I
wasn't certain they would remember each other, but Pebbles and Skittles
bonded almost immediately. Sometimes I come home and they're curled
up together, sleeping, as if they had never been apart.
It's rare that I get to witness these moments, though. Skittles has a
truly heightened sense of awareness, even when sound asleep. The
slightest change in the household will bring her to full alertness, and
if she even gets the tiniest inkling that I am near, she will
immediately bolt. As a result, I have very few pictures of Skittles, and
those I do have, are not of the best quality, because she's usually on
the move.
Skittles has found her safe spot. It's under my enormous bed. She's found that she's small enough to squeeze under the platform base and has discovered the “cave” at the very back of the bed. There's a
large space behind the bed, beneath the headboard where she can hide and
not be bothered. There's a window behind the bed and the sunlight from
that window lights up the cave during the daytime and makes for a
perfect kitty spot. Of course, it’s also an anti-human spot. Accessing
that particular spot involves removing the mattress and three giant
boards from the platform bed, then lying flat on the ground in a tiny
space to squeeze beneath the headboard to try to reach her. Not that
I’ve done any of this because that would just freak her out. I’m just
saying… in a pinch, I’d be hard-pressed to get to her.
Ever since releasing her from the back bedroom, I’ve been wondering
if I made a mistake. At least while she was in the back bedroom, I was
able to pet her on a daily basis. Now that she has a spot where she can
truly become inaccessible to me, I have no hope of forcing any
interactions with her, and have to instead rely upon her eventual desire
to come to me. I wonder if this will ever happen. I miss our bonding
time and it breaks my heart to think that she probably doesn't feel the same at all.
