Memoir of an Ancient Feline

Countless thoughts circulate in my bygone mind as I attempt to recount the last seven millennia of my existence. From my birth in the human kingdom of D’mt to my now coming death in this departed sphere of lifelessness. I am tired, but I cannot let the world perish without one last conveyance of fervour.  

There are many experiences and feelings I could choose to tabulate. Archaeological expeditions from the hairless ones never did eventuate in much knowledge of my place of birth relatively speaking. I could talk about my time being worshipped as a God, my encounters with an actual God, or maybe my journey across the seas during the war which ended in Death herself roaring with laughter.

Or perhaps, I could attempt to impart my experience with true, unbridled, uncontainable, happiness.

It was on the Gregorian calendar year of 1231. I was living a relatively simple life at this point as what one lacking taste might call a “house cat” in the Republic of Florence. One eve, I decide to stroll through an empty plaza, carefully observing the perfect craftsmanship and symmetry of the stone buildings lining the footpaths, until I spot a human in the distance. Usually, unless a human belongs to my household or has a similar chance of offering me food I simply ignored them, but this one was especially peculiar.

Even up until humanity’s extinction I never did get the hang of discerning the difference between the male and female counterparts, but this human had a relatively slender build, hair reaching their shoulders, eyes a sort of navy blue that matched the sky on this eve. What piqued my interest however was their actions. The being in question was standing on the footpath, facing towards me, head tilted 100 degrees up simply looking at the sky, not saying a word.

I walked over to them, interested in what they were so focused on. I stood next to them in the same position, simply staring, but could see nothing.

This human must see something, however. It annoyed me that due to the longevity of my lifetime, I had probably seen fifty times more than what this human could ever dream of seeing, yet it was clearly observing something that I could not make out.

We stood there for hours, up until 3:02 pm the next afternoon. Passers-by would look at the creature with confusion, annoyance, hatred, curiosity. Eventually, the person looks down at me, seemingly just noticing me.

No.

They give a knowing smile, clearly having been aware of my presence and mimicry for the last few hours at least.

“Hi there! My name is Beatrice, what’s yours?” they remark with a gleeful attitude. Definitely not something you would expect from someone who has been awake standing in the same position for that long.

I look at Beatrice with an equal level of confusion that the previous passers-by gave them. This human knows that if I attempt to communicate an answer, they will not understand me. Why does it ask my name?

The human gives another knowing smile.

“Well, I’m going to name you Immanuel.”

Truth be told, I never really understood the need for names, up until this point I was simply a spectre moving through time. I was given many names as I had spent hundreds of years cumulatively as a companion of one human or another, purely because it’s more comfortable than living in the wild or with those dreadful strays.

“Would you like to eat with me? I stole some breadsticks from that bakery over there earlier, I’m sorry I don’t know what cats usually like to eat.”

I simply stare at them; she takes that as a sign of acceptance and gives me two out of her four breadsticks.

As we eat, Beatrice details their life. An aspiring writer and poet who had suffered a great deal of trauma in her life. She spends much of her time reading the ancient Roman and Greek poets such as Virgil and Hesiod. It was at this point that I also learned she was a woman.

“I want to write about happiness, and how people who are sad can gain it, but more importantly I want to help people who lack happiness experience it for the first time.”

This seems ridiculous to me; everyone must have experienced happiness at least once in their lives. Humans seem to be great pleasure seekers, and even those I’ve lived with in absolute poverty seem to experience happiness when spending time with the ones they love.

“Sometimes, there’s one element in a person’s life that keeps them from being truly happy, or maybe sometimes they lack an element? What’s beautiful about literature and poetry, Immanuel, is that through literature and poetry we can provide a person with one of these elements or remove it, even just briefly.”

For the first time in my life, I sit there without counting the seconds and minutes, I simply contemplate Beatrice’s sagely words. Is there an element I am missing? It cannot possibly be, I’ve lived so long at this point that I would have found it by now.

I want to hear more from Beatrice, I simply nudge her hoping to get her attention.

She understood what I meant.

Beatrice goes on to talk about sadness,

“In many cases, people who have experienced complete sadness are the ones who are first to feel true happiness,” she remarks with a sorrowful focus, clearly remembering something from her lifetime.

“Think of it this way, Immanuel, if you grow up eating breadsticks your entire life, and then eat a nice succulent salmon, how much better is the salmon going to taste than if you had spent your entire cat-childhood eating fish?”

My previous expression of curiosity has by this point moved to an expression of wonder. For the last thousand years, my interactions with humans have been marked by condescension and being treated as an inferior species, but this person is discussing with me the philosophy of happiness and attempting to relate it to me as if I am one of her.

Almost as if the human understands me.

We sat there in silence once again, and I began to hear Beatrice snoring softly. Not wanting to sleep on the pavement like her, I walked back to my house, but I was only able to get 4 hours of sleep as I was thinking a lot about what Beatrice had said.

I’m woken in the morning by being abruptly and roughly picked up by one of the younger humans I live with. Knowing the punishment will be severe if I scratch my way out of this, I simply let it go on and think about whether or not I should seek out Beatrice again.

At 8 pm that night I walked to the plaza again, she noticed me, and this time had meat of some sort that we ate together. I wondered how she acquired it, probably stole it again.

I wanted to hear more about her conceptions of happiness, so I nudged her once again.

She smiled at me knowingly and told me a story from her life.

When she was young, Beatrice had experienced terrible trauma and as a result, would not talk to anyone for years.

“Until one day, a girl named Martina entered our school. Rather than ignore and treat me as a pariah like the other children did, she tried to talk to me each day, a little bit more than the last.”

Tears well up in Beatrice’s eyes as a reminiscing smile forms across her face.

“One day Martina told me about the pain she had experienced in her life and expressed to me all of the feelings that I had been feeling for years, I felt like someone had truly understood me, and for the first time in years, I spoke to another person.”

That word again, could it be–

“Martina passed away soon after, she fell sick and her parents could not afford a doctor, but ever since I have felt nothing but happiness, as I found the element that was missing from it.”

I looked up at Beatrice, waiting for her to tell me what that element was, but suddenly two men came running towards us, looks of vexation on their faces.

They demand the beef that Beatrice had stolen from them, the same beef that we had just eaten.

They threatened to kill Beatrice if she didn’t give it back, and for the first time in my thousand-year life at that point, I was ready to risk it to defend another life.

While I may have been a never ageing cat, I was still only a cat, and the butchers easily overpowered me before making their way to Beatrice, ready to ensure she never steals from them again. Powerless, we both sprint for our lives and eventually outrun them.

For the first time since coming across Beatrice I actually tried to communicate with her, knowing full well it would just come out as ‘cat noises’ I asked what the element was that she was missing.

With me being in a state of absolute euphoria and realisation, she responds and says, “I’m glad you asked Immanuel, the missing element was that I wanted to feel understood.”

Beatrice disappeared soon after, it was as if I blinked and she was gone, but that was the day that I, a being unlike any other creature on the planet, had finally felt as if there was another like me, and found my missing element of happiness.

Ironically, I now stand on an earth completely void of all life with no possibility of feeling companionship again, waiting patiently for my own death as I feel my body finally beginning to break. Maybe that’s why this is the memory I’ve chosen to recount. Either way, hopefully, this memoir ensures that I never truly die.