Woke up and the cat wasn’t at my feet. Weird. Come to think of it, I didn’t hear anything getting smashed last night either — could the cat have run off?
So I flipped 180 degrees out of my groggy haze and got up to check whether the cat was still around.
As usual, I pulled out the ham-sausage-slicing knife and slid it out of its sheath to make a noise. Normally that’s enough to summon the cat, who shows up demanding ham sausage. This time, nothing.
What the hell. No way.
Then I switched to the cat’s point of view and searched under the bed, under the sofa, under the cabinets — still nothing.
Lately the cat likes jumping off the balcony to go play, so it probably slipped out again during the night. I went out and searched the floors, going through all three — 25, 26 and 27 — and still found no trace. Fine. I accept it: it’s gone missing.
What grief in coming, what sorrow in going — it’s all fine.
Coincidentally, the last image I got in the group chat last night was this one (does it mean something?):
The cat lived here for 10 months. Maybe it got bored and wanted a change of scene, or it went off to find itself a husband. Since it isn’t in any of the building’s common areas, it looks like it did what it did when it first came to me: knocked on someone’s door and got them to take it in. I still have an unopened bag of cat food here, and it just up and left like that. A bit of a shame.
Last year I was holed up at home all the time, never going out, with no one to hang out with, so I got a cat along the way. But lately the trend is that I often need to go out, and I’ll be traveling far from home for a while. Having no one to look after the cat is a big problem — it would require either me or my mom to always be home, which would seriously tie up both our schedules. Seen that way, the cat’s leaving is one link in the chain of fate. Its original mission is complete, its journey is over, and now the time has come to part ways — without putting anyone out.
Thriving in adversity, perishing in comfort. This is an unusual cat. It’s greedy, it’s a glutton, it won’t settle for the status quo, it dares to venture out, its ambitions stretch a thousand miles, and it won’t fritter away its life in comfort at one household. So more thrilling journeys await it. A cat like this — how could it ever stay long in a place like mine?
I wish Wind Cat a new, full and happy life, wherever it goes.
Years from now, when I’ve made new friends and partners, when everything has changed and nothing is the same, when my career has taken off — will I still remember those once-familiar smiling faces, and every living being along the way that lent me a hand? Friends grown old, family members gone, classmates who vanished into the sea of faces, the cat that companioned my loneliness…
A note for my future self, should I read this again someday: every individual, no matter how big or small, is a great existence, and each has contributed its strength to making the unique me in time and space. Without them there is no me. Thank you, every living being!