And so I put a bandage over it, tugging carefully at the ends, making sure that I didn’t make too tight a knot. Sitting by the window, the neighbor’s Christmas lights were off, and the building looked like a monster in the dark, the fog thick and immense, the fog eating me.
“Why bother taking care of a wound,” spoke a voice at my side, quietly, in a sagely kind of way, and I looked down to see the fat, orange cat, “when it closes naturally?”
“Because…” I started, then hesitated to continue, for I realised I was talking to a cat. After a moment: “…because it feels better that way.”
“I think nature is most intelligent, what do you think?”
“I guess so, too. But I”m not sure.”
After a few minutes of silence, still looking at my computer screen, I asked quietly: “Why then, do you lick your wounds, after a fight with the neighbor’s cat?”
He didn’t even blink. “Because that’s what cats do. And if you’ve noticed, I’m a cat.”
“Sarcastic one, too.”
“We’re all sarcastic.”
I opened Photoshop and started to make a beautiful drawing of a cat.
“And since we’re playing 20 Questions here, human being, tell me this: Why do you leave notes in wallets?”
“Because I like the idea of opening something to take money and coming up with something money can’t buy.”
“How cliché,” replied the cat. “Could you be any more corny? I’d love to see you try.”
“Why is it,” I asked, still staring at the computer, “that you come up to breathe air, then you dive down again, and you try to swim but you don’t know what it’s for, and you don’t know how you learned to dive, and it all comes naturally, and wounds heal by themselves, and bandages soothe the mind, and incense calms, and tea makes the stomach sound funny, and my fingers, my fingers, they feel so rough and calloused, as if my fingerprints are too heavy?”
The cat refused to answer, it was busy licking its paws. A few more minutes passed, the temperature dropped, and so did my energy, and the fog continued to hide bad people with bad intentions as far as my eye could see.
I started to feel sad. I was talking to a cat, I was drawing a cat, and it was far from perfect. And the Christmas lights were still off. And I knew that everyday everywhere there were people talking to cats, like me, and healing their wounds, like me, and bringing together all their remaining energy to make beautiful drawings, even though it didn’t matter.
“I lick my paws,” said the cat, slowly, languidly, his voice like a spoon turning in a cup of coffee, “because I have no hands to put bandages on the places that hurt.”
That was the last thing he told me, and he went to the kitchen, his tail swinging, to take a drink of water.
The wound under my bandage started to heal, because the body makes it that way, because that’s how humans work and cope, and when I saved my drawing on Photoshop, I saw that what I had created was perfect.
