Yours. Mine. Ours?

I got Robot two weeks after moving into my first apartment alone. It was a Kathy Bates (circa “Misery,’’ not “Fried Green Tomatoes’’) time, and getting a cat while living by myself was a step toward my inevitable end; I could almost taste it - I would be 52 but look 80, having worn the same nightgown for so long it would have melted with my skin, surrounded by maybe 70 cats.

We were buds, Robot and I. She never said a word when I listened to the New Radicals; it was important for me to remember during that period that I still had the music in me. She would sleep next to me, then just a fistful of fur and ears the size of baklava triangles.

Then Greg moved in. The way I have written this makes the move seem unprecedented - like he just showed up at my STUDIO apartment with his SEVEN guitars. And if I don’t clarify I may be living alone again after this is published.

We’d been together for about six months, and it had become one of those situations where, with the exception of the instruments and the official title, for all intents and purposes we were living together already. The guitars were merely ceremonial.

Robot, despite Greg’s protest to the contrary, is smart and sensed this symbolic gesture. When he moved in for good she started exhibiting a whole new gamut of behaviors. Robot began to drag any boxer shorts that Greg left on the floor into her litter box; this sounds like the sort of personification of “lady frustrations’’ that Candace Bushnell would bestow on a cat in a work of fiction. (The only thing that men are more afraid of than commitment is cleaning. . . . Am I right ladies?! Am I right?!) But every time I clean her box, there is a drawer’s worth of undergarments buried among other treasures.

Robot also became increasingly violent, mauling Greg’s feet and arms under the cloak of night. This was all the more terrifying because, living in a studio apartment, we had no bedroom door to protect us. We had fed Gizmo after midnight. The gremlin had been awoken.

Greg and I have since moved to a bigger apartment, one we picked out together, Robot in tow. This despite his many suggestions to euthanize her for the sake of humanity. But she is my cat and has been there through thick and thin.

The apartment we moved to has a patio that we share with a neighbor and her potted plants. The porch looks over a dog park. For the first time in her life Robot gets to experience the outdoors - basking in the sunlight and killing all of our neighbor’s plant-life, operating under the assumption that ceramic pots are just oddly shaped litter boxes. Sitting on the porch with her one afternoon, I discovered a deep-seated desire. I wanted a dog. I’d always wanted a dog.

Now, I had set my mind on a dog, preferably a slow moving, stately mutt that I could name Wellington. However, there is a snag in my master plan. Greg has made it abundantly clear that he does not want a Wellington or a Clifford or even a little dachshund named Dottie.

He is obviously a sadistic monster.

Greg cites Robot as a testament against the domestication of animals. “If we ever had to, if it came down to us fighting for our lives, she weighs 7 pounds,’’ Greg reasons. “I could easily throw her out a window. A dog would pose a greater physical threat.’’

Perhaps more daunting than the prospect of adopting Cujo is that we would get a dog that Greg actually liked. It wouldn’t be just my dog. It would be our dog. We’ve been together for nearly three years. We bought a couch together and watched Robot destroy it together. We quit smoking together. I would miss at least two of his guitars if they weren’t around anymore.

Our lives are intertwined. A dog is the physical manifestation of this. And if the interconnection were to unravel, he would take the Melody Maker and the Martin and I would get the cat. But what about Wellington?