Last Updated on June 1, 2026 by admin
Today is the first day of Pride Month. On the second floor of a small adobe house in Albuquerque, a calico cat is asleep on a yoga mat that has not been used for yoga in eighteen months.
The cat is Sienna. She is eleven. Her left ear has a small nick from a fight she had as a stray, before any of this began.
Marisol Beltran is forty-six. She is a property-tax assessor for the city. She came out as transgender to her mother in 2015, at a kitchen table in El Paso, in a conversation that lasted three hours and ended with her mother saying, “I want you to be alive more than I want anything else, and that means I have to learn this.”
Her mother died in 2019. Marisol moved to Albuquerque in 2020. In 2021, she met Gloria.
Gloria brought Sienna with her when she moved in. Sienna had been Gloria’s cat for nine years. She was a rescue from the Animal Humane New Mexico shelter on Virginia Street in 2015. Gloria had told the adoption counselor she wanted a cat that did not flinch. The counselor had looked at Sienna and said, “She doesn’t flinch. She decides.”
Marisol and Gloria split in October 2024. The split was not unkind. It was the kind of slow ending two people reach when one of them realizes they are no longer in love and the other realizes they have been alone in the relationship for some time.
Gloria moved to Santa Fe in November.
Sienna did not.
“You were her person before me,” Gloria said in the kitchen, on the last night, looking down at the cat on the floor between them. “She’s been your person for two years. I’m not taking her.”
Marisol said no. Gloria said yes. Sienna stayed.
The first three weeks were quiet. Sienna sat on the windowsill in the morning and on the yoga mat in the afternoon. She ate. She slept. She did not appear to be grieving, or relieved, or anything in particular. She was simply present in the way cats are present — as if the room belonged to her and the people in it were guests.
One evening in late November, Marisol came home from a difficult workday and sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets, because she did not have the energy to make it to the couch.
Sienna came in from the living room. She walked across the tile. She climbed into Marisol’s lap. She put her head on Marisol’s knee, and did not move for forty-one minutes.
Marisol cried for the first time in three weeks. Quietly. Into her hand.
That was eighteen months ago.
The yoga mat in the corner is where Sienna sleeps now in the afternoons. Marisol stopped doing yoga sometime around January. She has been thinking about starting again. She has been thinking about it for five months.
On Sunday morning, the day before Pride started, Marisol bought a small rainbow flag and stuck it in the planter on the front step. Sienna watched from the windowsill. She did not flinch.
“She decides,” Marisol said to the empty kitchen. “Always has.”
Today is the first day of Pride Month. In Albuquerque, an eleven-year-old calico is asleep on a yoga mat in a house with one person in it, and the windowsill is warm, and the door is closed, and nobody is leaving.
Sometimes the family that stays is the cat.