The house is quiet. It is more than still; it is absent one person, and her absence makes a difference.Dixie, one of our cats, jumps up and cries. She looks all over the house for the absent person, and she whimpers unrelentingly. She will not be reassured. There is a demanding urgency to her whining. The person who usually feeds her is gone, and the poor cat is frantic (as if I am going to somehow pour axle grease into the cat food … give me a break!).“I fed you already!,” I tell her. She just looks at me with those yellow eyes as if to say, “What don't you get, stupid? You're not the one I want right now.”My wife is in Chicago keeping company with one of our friends who had major surgery and will be returning to the Island in about a week; let's hope it is not any longer than that!Dixie would have a fit.My wife tells me to pick the cat up, look into her eyes, and tell her what's going on, that her “momma” will be back soon, and she will understand. I feel like I'm going nuts. The cat will understand? Maybe I should consult the cat on all my cases at work as well. Never the less, I do it. I don't know if the exercise was actually more for my own benefit or if it actually did help the cat. I'm a gestalt guy; was it like talking to the empty chair?They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Sometimes absence just makes a person feel frenzied. I'm sure this is what happens to people when they lose a partner, someone who has been part of daily life for a long time. The empty space is felt at a basic level. Instead of the sound of that other person moving about in the house, there is nothing.It is a silent space. You fall into that space like it's an abyss. It's like walking next to a cliff and feeling yourself pulled over the edge, when in fact your feet are firmly on solid ground and there is nothing drawing you over. The sense of it, what it's like to be in your skin, though, is that you are falling off the cliff. So, you jump back; you qualify the moment and hedge your bets by moving a step or two away from the edge.I found myself talking out loud to the cats. I found myself eating to fill the silence. I found myself watching more television. These are things people do.At least I did not leave the television on to create background noise and just walk away from it.At least I picked up my guitar and practised some major scale patterns, cranked up the gain, and let her rip. I consider that productive. Okay, so I played the same chord progressions over and over and the same riffs over and over; it's a kind of hypnosis only guitar players understand. It's healthy. Really.Writing was more difficult, however. It's a reflective exercise in which you sit still and have to think. Thinking was not easy. Working with my brain was not simple. When I was supposed to be editing chapters in a book, and comparing notes with my co-editor, I was chomping down Fritos Scoops with jalapeño dip.The seeds have the heat, but the flesh has the flavour. According to the Wikipedia, the heat is caused by capsaicin and related compounds and is concentrated in the membrane surrounding the seeds, which are called picante.Chipotles are smoked jalapeños. When I make salsa, I put it all in together. This is all babbling. I was losing it.Picking up the guitar again, this time I practised Eric Clapton's song, “Holy Mother,” only I changed the words a bit. In my version, it starts out like this:Holy Father, where are you?Tonight I feel broken in two.I've seen the stars fall from the sky.Abba Father, can't keep from crying.Oh, I need your help this timeTo get me through this lonely night.Tell me please, which way to turn,To find myself in You.My gestalt friends call this interdependence on another person confluence. It can be a way of denying differences between two people, and when it is that, it destroys intimacy.However, confluence can also be the result of established intimacy two people sharing their lives to such an extent that their selves seem intertwined.It's like a tree that grows up leaning against a stake; when you take the stake away, the tree tends to blow over in a slight breeze (until it gains enough self support to stand alone).I have become confluent with my wife; it's what happens in intimate relationships. I learned to lean up against her for the simple things like feeding the cats and eating my dinner for just feeling comfortable being in a quiet house. Without her there, the silence drowns out my solitude. I realise that I did not always have her and that one of us will leave this world before the other. I realise that my relationship with God is what orients my life, that it's the stake up against which I truly lean.But that's not all there is to the story. In the story of beginnings in Genesis, God said that it is not good for a human being to be alone, and that each one needs someone else with whom to be intimate. I get it. Linda fits that picture for me, and I for her.Now, what I'd like to know is how four cats became part of our story!