If Cats Disappeared from the World

by Genki Kawamura

This is going to be my first and my last letter to you. It’s also my will and testament.

Here I was standing at death’s door and I couldn’t think of a single person I cared enough about to call. I’ve connected with many people over the course of my life, but the relationships were ultimately all superficial. It’s really depressing—too depressing—to realize something like that at the end of your life.

“In order to gain something, you have to lose something,” she always said. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.

“There are so many cruel things in the world,” he once told us. “But there are also just as many beautiful things.”

I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so, we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it must come to an end.

It’s the future you’ll never get to see that you really regret missing most of all when you die.

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.

What else could you call it apart from love? 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. No sooner had these thoughts occurred to me than my ears suddenly picked up something that sounded like the ticking of a clock. But when I looked around, everything was just as before; there were no clocks to be found anywhere. Nevertheless, even though I couldn’t see it with my eyes, I got the feeling that there was something spurring me on. I started to get the sense that the endless ticking sound in my head might actually be the sound of the hearts of all the people in the world beating in time with one another.

I remembered something that my mother said a long time ago: “Cats and humans have been partners for over ten thousand years. One thing you realize when you’ve lived with a cat for a long time is that you may think that you own them, but that’s not really the way it is. Cats simply allow us the pleasure of their company.”

“Yeah, but just being alive doesn’t mean all that much on its own. How you live is more important.”

A lot of people buy into the slogan “Live life like there’s no tomorrow.” But I tend to disagree. Once you become aware of your impending death, you have to make a compromise in accepting the loss of the life you wish you could have led and the reality of your imminent death. Sure, there will always be regrets and broken dreams, but you have to go easy on yourself. Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that there’s a certain beauty in those regrets. They’re proof of having lived.