If Cats Disappeared from the World

by Genki Kawamura

And that’s how, in a surprisingly low-key kind of way, the devil appeared in my life.

I realized that for the most part we just call cat food “cat food.” But humans, we’re not satisfied with calling all our food “human food.” No, we’re much fussier than that.

Perhaps that’s what drives all human progress: an insatiable desire for new things.

In the span of two decades something that we don’t really need has come to dominate our lives and make us believe that we can’t live without it. When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety that comes with not having one on you.

It was like an old football injury that ached on rainy days. But I guess that’s not that unusual. I must have a whole collection of small injuries, tucked away somewhere in the recesses of my memory. I suppose those are what some people call regrets.

I’ve been stringing together the movies I’ve seen like rosary beads. All that human hope and disappointment held together by a thread. It doesn’t take much to realize that all life’s experiences eventually add up to one big inevitability.

the cinema uses the language of dreams.”

And love, this magical thing that’s unique to human beings and can sometimes make us absolutely miserable, is also the thing that buoys the human spirit. Like time, color, temperature, and loneliness, love is one of those things that only humans experience. These things can rule over or control us, but they also allow us to live more fully. They are precisely what make us human.