Cat and Love

Instruction, or warning, or preface, or introduction, or disclaimer, or whatever that goes before the official text: If you want a mawkish love story, read until 1; if you don’t mind a rambling rumination that is at best a cheap imitation of a philosophical discourse between two undereducated inner voices causing a self-inflicted good-for-nothing psychological torment, read until 2; if you don’t hate math, and in particular are a mathematician willing to put up with a clumsy metaphor involving a basic concept in low-dimensional topology, algebraic geometry and singularity theory as a way to wrap up a short story for some shock effect because the content of the story alone is so meager and the author is at the wit’s end, read until 3. If you want none of the above, read until 0 or stop right here.

0

In the dewy yet glassy evening wind blowing from the impending new year or somewhere east, on tiptoes, one arm raising, just barely, Eve captured a divine message with her fingertips. The message had been migrating in the wind like a tampopo seed, metamorphosing to the rhythm of breathing, petrified at the moment of its first contact with Eve's fingertips, containing a revelation more revealing than the stopping of a slot machine, a message bestowed only to those who were seeking, reaching, and lucky, and hence making sense of everything that had been happening to her lately. 

1

January, sad. February, sadder. March, the saddest. April, torture. May, winter. June, illusions and disillusioned, oblivion and yellow flowers. July, drowning in viscous sweet mucus of music and memories infused with laundry scent and something more. August, nothing new, except that there came Aries, and they made eye contact for the first time. September, Eve took the courage and said to Aries I’ve been wondering what’s your name as I remember you from August, and Aries smiled and replied it’s nice to meet you again. October, stairs, sunsets and darkness. November, vomits, concussion and despair. Still November, Aries didn’t come back as anticipated. Still November, Eve wrote to Aries. Still November, Aries replied. Still November, scenes shifting outside the window. Still November, they started talking. December, stepping inside a mirrored world where everything was reversed, happiness slapping her face with the same amplitude of force as sadness had been, as a tsunami hitting the shore. Still December, tipping, tripping, oozing, overflowing. Still December, dreams, daydreams, night dreams, barely sleeping, squirrels and trains. Still December, Eve wrote to Aries:

I feel the urge to confess.

I told you that you reminded me of an orchid flower. The truth was that the orchid flower was actually the sweet osmanthus. The sweet osmanthus that was albino-silhouette. I guess during the few chocolates we shared, somehow I felt like you really reminded me of the sweet osmanthus — you seemed very quiet and reserved, among other things, just like the sweet osmanthus. And my antennas were clouded, on one hand, I wanted to be an orchid flower, but on the other hand, I wasn’t sure if it was because you reminded me of the sweet osmanthus.

I was mentioning that this year had been really swamp for me. The biggest peach core is actually the withering. It was right at the end of March. We built an airship, both of our very first, and it floated for almost exactly one year. It was a bitter almond pretty much right down the throat. The bottom half of the ship was dripping air in slow-motion, shrinking and withering. We both tried to be giraffes, but we couldn’t have and there was just too much sand, too little soil. So the roots of the sweet osmanthus started to loosen and detach; eventually in a debris stream, flowing downward, the trunk was only half afloat. I couldn’t be a salmon, so I followed along. 

And then I moved away to live in the rainforest, waiting for the rain to become a curtain and divide the forest. It took another two months, and the ship withered. It was just so sad, beyond words. The worst of all is that I found myself a python wanting to embrace when I could only strangle, and I tried to erase my colors. 

Our garden was chromophobic; albino-silhouette was chromophobic, but I was colorful. I drank colors, conserved colors, snowed colors, and so my sadness and colors wetted, flooded, asphyxiated the sweet osmanthus, in an endless whirlpool, it hurt both of us like the ocean. We knew, I knew, that’s why it withered, it had to. I knew, but still, I didn’t know how to be a gypsy just yet, so I tried to be an aspen tree instead, with black-and-white trunks and becoming my own entire forest. Maybe then, perhaps then, would the sweet osmanthus bloom again for me, then? In the summer, I lived in an igloo, lighted a candle, and was carving and praying to my wooden St. John statue. I was a silent lake held up in a pensieve made of ice balanced at the tip of Mount Everest, Himalaya, in solitude, smooth, cold and delicate. But a tiny pebble would cause a ripple, and the ripple would crack the pensieve, and the pensieve would shatter, and the water, the ice, the splinters, the glitters, the solitude, everything, I. I would cascade.

So it happened at the end of the summer, when I found out that my St. John statue was molded and soaked in water. That was when I lost my eyes and clogged my blowhole, as to whom could I pray no more? I started descending, and kept on descending, with underwater volcanos erupting alongside me one after another, and sounds pressed out of me clean. What an Elysium for hell, don’t you think. I was so big, so heavy, the biggest and the heaviest. So where else could I go but down? I couldn’t have fought and won against my own gravity, with just that little buoyancy, how quixotic of me for even trying? I saw a pool of light high up and far away, it was laughing at me. I cleared the molds and dried up my St. John statue but the praying couldn’t begin again. Hopscotching between day and night, and at a moment of leaping, I slipped into the rain.

But then I realized that since September, I had always been sunflowering toward you a constellation again. I didn’t know what I wanted from the stars, if I were redwoods. I think cherry blossoms of you, but I wasn’t sure if it was because you reminded me of the sweet osmanthus. I was gris when you didn’t come back in November. So I climbed to the top of the belfry and released the pigeons because I wanted to breathe again, I had to, anything but keep diving down the seamounts and squeezing down my already empty lungs. It took me the entire Chile to get there. 

And then the pigeons came back. Along with a billion fireflies. The evening sky became diaphanous and I. I could touch my sign. Not the sweet osmanthus, you are different. And I just wish I could decipher the whispers of your currents, pick seashells on the shore. What kinds of fishes swim in there?

It is a single and forlorn daffodil bud tricked by the January warmth to allow the formation of pearls, like holding a piece of prickly pear with bare hands. But the pearls are shimmering and a part of me. So I wanted to tell you.

Eve

Still December, they stopped talking.

2

It was between the letter of confession and the final conviction when the message from beyond was delivered through air, when everything was still up in the air. As it turned out, the light-stricken happiness didn’t come to Eve without a cost, at least not without the cost of someone else’s misfortune, or something else’s, as everything came with a cost, a law set in stone since the infancy of the universe, because symmetry was fragile and beautiful and to soothe the solitude of sonder. Usually, such inter-being exchanges of gain and loss would stay hidden from the gifted and the robbed, like an accounting’s secret book. But Eve was special to have caught the rare page of epiphany and learned that her recent happiness came from Semmel’s misfortune. 

Semmel was Willow’s cat. He was born in an animal shelter in Hungary 7 months ago. Eve remembered the message she got from Willow a while ago informing her about the adoption along with a short video of Semmel getting confused by his own reflection in the mirror. Semmel had two big and round eyes in a sort of blueish-grey color. His fur was a mix of warm beige and pale orange, not particularly long, but seemed fluffy enough. Semmel was cute, even by cats’ standards. And silly, too, even better — apparently he doesn’t know how big he is; sometimes he would try to sit on my foot, with all four paws on it, which is clearly impossible but he was just so confused that it did not work, I feel like you would enjoy him a lot, Willow’s message said.

Eve had never met Semmel in person, but she was having high hopes for that day to come and it had never occurred to her that the possibility of such a day not coming with the most certain certainty existed. She was on a train when the bell calling for the end of intermission went off, indicating the true story was about to begin, the first alarm of misfortune, the closing of the tangle to form a link. Nothing less than beautiful was possible for a train ride. Even the trashes outside the window were beautiful, not to mention the deserts, the oak trees, the coastlines, the sunset, the twilight. Gazing out, Eve was mesmerized — everything was magical and surreal. Aries responded to her initial letter and in a few days, she would be able to ask for more than just his name… The sound of the bell of misfortune was a sharp stretched-out Ding — Willow’s message came: Semmel is sick; he lost a lot of weight and is almost lethargic; it’s unclear why and I’m having some tests run but it’s possible he has one of those terrible cat viruses. 

A few days later, Eve heard back from Willow: it seems that Semmel has both leucosis and FIP, he is not going to live much longer. It’s only a matter of time, and in fact very little time, when he will have to be put to sleep so that he can be out of his misery. No treatment makes sense. He is such a precious soul, and so young, this waiting around and seeing him get worse is going to hurt so bad. I am devastated. In the picture Willow sent, Semmel had lost so much weight and looked utterly frail. Eve was very sad, and never thought things would have come to this. She didn’t know how to console Willow because she knew he loved Semmel so much. And she didn’t know how to tell Willow that her heart was dancing because of Aries when Semmel was sentenced to death, either.

The morning after Eve sent out the letter of confession, she got another message from Willow saying: Semmel seemed to be getting slightly better, but then was doing worse again. It’s so heart-wrenching to see him like this but I’m still trying everything. It’s possible that there might have been a misdiagnosis and he only really has one of the two viruses, and there is a Chinese black market drug for treating FIP. I’m using it on Semmel, we’ll see how it goes. It’s my last hope. Eve tried to be optimistic and hopeful, and was cheering Willow up. Of course, she didn’t mention the letter she sent out.

It was later on the same day when the holy message was carried to Eve by the wind. And then everything lined up. The timeline, the ups and downs, everything. It all made sense to her now. How could I not have noticed sooner? My recent happiness is fueled by Semmel’s life, we are linked, Eve thought to herself, it’s like a seesaw. 

Eve had been genuinely happy ever since Aries entered her life. She felt strength and warmth fountaining out from within her, gradually filling up her deep and empty vessel, and she’d never wish it to stop. But it seemed morally questionable to her now to still keep wanting all that if it was going to cost Semmel’s life. Her inner force of manifestation was getting wobbly. What pained her the most, though, was that she couldn’t wholeheartedly wish for Semmel’s weal anymore, either. She didn’t know what to think. 

It’s love that we are talking about, how could I stop wanting it, even if I wanted to? 

But how could you bear the thought of Semmel dying just for you to find love again? Your wanting is a conscious choice of being a bystander of his death. And he is only 7 months old. Just a baby. Had a cold and abusive early life in the shelter, abandoned by his mother, or perhaps separated from her, or perhaps she died soon after giving birth to him; grew up in an overcrowded and unsanitary environment, suffered malnutrition, submissive to dogs, bullied by bigger and older cats, neglected and barbarously handled by humans, I don’t know, just make up the most tragic and dramatic story you possibly can, and that’s probably what Semmel’s life was like before his adoption — Willow said when Semmel first arrived home he was extremely scared and did not dare to leave his hiding place for a full day before finally interacting with people... Yet he’s sweet and pure and terrified and gentle and silly and eager and innocent and soulful, and he has finally just found warmth for the first time, finally is living a good life now. How can you take that away from him, his life? 

But why is life more important than love? Because it’s wider in scope and bigger in volume? Is love not comparable to life? Just look at the Japanese literary scene of the twentieth century, how the obsession with love and beauty could be elevated to justify suicide. And really, everybody commits suicide, Mishima, Kawabata, Dazai, themselves and the characters they bring to life, everybody, because to die for love, to die for love is to let inochi burn like hanabi, within a shyunkan containing infinity, and there is nothing more utsukushii. So then love, along with the power and poetry pertaining to it, dominates life, or for the least love is of the same order of magnitude as life, they are comparable, and there is nothing wrong with choosing love over life.

Nothing wrong? What you just talked about, that’s kind of a sickly love. Love melancholy, as how Robert Burton would put it. He’d probably diagnose such love as heroical melancholy, that’s my best guess, although maybe it’s too radical for his Renaissance Christian soul to even fathom those postwar Japanese so he might call upon blasphemy and religious melancholy (which still falls under love melancholy, as love includes love for god, obviously). But let’s say it’s heroical melancholy, and here is a quote: You have heard how this tyrant love rages with brute beasts and spirits. But if it rages it is no more love, but burning lust, a disease, frenzy, madness, hell. It subverts kingdoms, overthrows cities, towns, families, mars, corrupts, and makes a massacre of men… this brutish passion. See? It’s no more love. And guess what is Burton’s proposed cure for love melancholy? — By labor, diet, physic, fasting, etc. Don’t you notice, he’s describing life, to live, to simply live, to exercise, to eat well, to heal through time. That’s life, to traverse and endure time. Love is a famine, life is the cure. Plus, there is no love without life, dead people can’t love.

Trying to cure love but what is love anyway? You are citing someone who thinks two palm trees can fall in love with each other and uses horoscopes and astrology as means of medical justification, at least pick someone who died within the last century. (I thought you were a believer in horoscopes and astrology?) Is not love the source of emotions? Are not emotions what make life colorful? Dead people can’t love? They certainly can; they certainly can make those alive feel loved when they leave behind a long and rich legacy, so yes dead people can love indeed. Love is a fiesta, love is the day of the dead. Paz’s words sum it up perfectly: life and death, joy and sorrow, music and mere noise are united, not to re-create or recognize themselves, but to swallow each other up. Love is the weight of life. Love explodes. Love unifies.

No, love divides. Love is the quills of the porcupines. Love is the bridge that breaks at the midpoint. Love is the balloon sabotaging the desperate air dying to touch the needle on the outside. Love is the vacuum that sound and language cannot reach. Love embodies the furthest distance in the world, the distance that is you are just nearby but we can never become one. Love divides, and you out of all people should know it by heart, know it all too well. 

Please don’t get so sentimental. Love is an umbrella term — it encompasses many things, not just black or white, one or another. Love is a way of living, a way of being: Kierkegaard and Fromm would both agree. How one loves, how one lives, and there are millions of different ways. I guess Fermina Daza has one way of loving, one way of living, but Florentino Ariza tries them all, loves every woman of every race, every shape, every age, but perhaps trying them all is yet just another way of loving, another way of living. Love defines life.

That sounds like quite an oversimplification. What about intellect, then? Where does it situate in relation to love, or to life? Or are they just the two sides of the same coin? Two ways of experiencing the metaphysical river? Like La Maga and Oliviera? But nothing is explained at the end of the day anyway. There are just too many questions, too few answers. Why does it trigger fear to consider the absence of love as a concept, even though it seems completely fine or even desirable to not be in love at the moment? Why is time relevant to love? Is love final? Or an interminably intermediate stage? Is love a state of mind? Or a physical feeling? An abstraction? Or a specific act? Is it the union of scattered sparks? Or a continuous process? Why all the sadness? Why all the pains? Why so evanescent? Why so capricious? Why love? 

This is going nowhere, let’s stop getting more and more lost in all this metaphysical abstract nonsense that neither of us really understands anyway. It’s not helping. And don’t forget we are in a very specific situation, and a rather simple one, too, actually, no need to overcomplicate: I want love, whatever that means, I want to shake off my pains and feel happy again. You had a taste of happiness recently after being so deprived of it for such a long time and it was delicious and you want more. But if that happiness is going to cost Semmel’s life, do you still want it? If Semmel is going to die, do you still want it? To die. What that means is to no longer exist in this world. To never be found again, not lying on any floor of any apartment, or hiding behind any door of any closet. Not anywhere and only forever. Are you okay with it? Am I okay with it? Do you still want it? Do I still want it?

No. 

Perhaps not. 

No. 

And then there was silence, silence that was spreading on a piece of watercolor paper. The kind of silence that didn’t contain any pigments. Just a drop of transparent silence fell to the center of the still-wet colors and wrinkled the textured surface just a little bit more and pushed everything out to the boundary. The silence that was like an eraser. It was becoming clear to Eve what was going to happen. She got another message from Willow saying that Semmel was getting better and the black market (black magic?) drug was working miracles. In the picture, Semmel seemed to have put on some weight. But she had already known, not the specifics, but she knew Semmel was getting better. She was feeling it all along, Semmel’s fight for life. She knew because they were connected. She knew because her happiness was dying.

And that was when it all ceased to matter. Everything ceased to matter to her. As the caged blue bird started to become bloodthirsty again, expanding and fluttering wings anxiously trying to escape and grow large again, she didn’t know how to quell it. As what she had been wanting was fading away like a waning moon once and yet again, she could no longer withstand her pains and desires which were perhaps always one. She walked to the edge of something, and looking down there was a black mirror carrying a luring metallic gloss, somehow sucking her in, and it was like, it was like. It was like the forbidden fruit was tempting her. It was like her own darkened reflection who was more true more raw more selfish than her tampered self had become the forbidden fruit, tempting her. And that was when it all ceased to matter.

Oh, to hell with it, if I’m going to lose it anyway. Semmel is still fighting, so why can’t I be honest with myself? It’s only fair this way. I’m grateful I don’t have to press on any button, I never ever want that power, so please allow me the freedom to long for what I long for. Semmel, we are equal, and I want you well, but the desire for love is in my instinct, flowing in my blood, just as much as you wish to live, even if it means I succumb to all its melancholies and withdraw from rationalities. I can’t help it. I still want it. If the Devil is going to seize me, so be it. I still want it and I won’t get it and I’m already sad and hurt and broken anyway. Perhaps it’s only kindness that Faust was divested of his soul for obtaining the omniscient knowledge, because knowing everything means for whatever pleasures one savors, one watches the equal amount of pains suffered by another being, what kind of burden on the soul? Perhaps I shouldn’t have known. Perhaps I don’t want to know. The soul, my soul is getting heavy.

So take it, take it please. Be kind to me. The honey and gold of miseries flow in its veins; the heart is crooked and bursting into a brilliantly radiating dry rose, the limbs shriveled and dismantled as if those of an appetizing fried mummy, the head half-severed and dangling like a smile. Blood? There is no blood, the blood has long drained and evaporated, only countless flakes of blood clots are showering down like confetti, filling up the indescribable abstraction of a space or a void or a notion, celebrating. Where? Celebrating what, though? Don’t ask me. So take it, my soul, my best offering, my worst bearing, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it, take it from me, take it away from me, take it so that I can be empty. I want to be empty, absolutely empty where emptiness doesn’t exist, empty so that I don’t know I’m empty, empty so that I’m only body and flesh. Empty at last. Empty of love and pains, empty of desires and longings, empty of guilt and shame. Guilt and shame. Yes. I wish Semmel to live, selfishly, for at the end of everything, I still want the undeserved luxury of the absence of guilt and shame in me. How greedy.

3

The operation of blowup is subversive. In the simplest case, it replaces a single point sitting on a disk with a circle while keeping everything else intact, and the circle fits right in, how is that possible? If there haven’t been enough metaphors, here is one more: love is like a blowup, in the mathematical sense, as being in love is like getting lost in the kaleidoscope of lines that used to cross but now are disjoint and spiraling, becoming unorientable and disoriented in the fourth dimension where a point is turned into a circle, by math, but might as well by magic. Blowup is subversive. Love is subversive. Something else is also subversive — a singularity is also subversive. Let’s just say, the singularity is a cone point, for simplicity. Eve was stuck at a singularity, a cone point, a cone point that had the angle of 2 pi over sadness, and for a long time she couldn’t get out. It would have been nice if life could replace the cone point with a circle for her, but that didn’t happen. She didn’t get a blowup to resolve the singularity. Love didn’t come her way. But there is another way to get rid of the singularity which is in fact much simpler and more straightforward — to simply cut out the little cone and glue back in a smooth disk. Eve ended up on this other way, everything happened as if nothing happened, nothing changed, not the topology, but somehow she was happier now. Outside the tiny neighborhood set on which the story that went like a singularity was planted and a blowup didn’t occur but time eventually smoothed out everything, life seemed vast and beautiful again.

Semmel’s blood is almost clean now. He still has a bit of inflammation in his joints and it’s a bit difficult for him to walk but other than that, he’s pretty much healthy. Willow’s most recent message said. Eve was glad to hear that. She was satisfied with the ending of the story, she thought it couldn’t have gone better, or any other way. It was all for the best. Just like this. Thank you, Aries, you are my last bit of sadness. As for Semmel, Eve pictured him walking toward her and putting his soft little paw on her lowered hand, as if a peace offering, when she would by and by meet him for the first time, and she’d caress his fur gently, and that would be the moment when finally springing from the deepest corner of her heart a hymn started chanting Semmel, please live on forever, just as life itself.

*This story belongs to the manuscript.