quandary of a lost black cat

i played with this cat for half an hour, until i realized that it wasn’t him.

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istanbul life > spring

i spent the last three mornings looking for a black cat — which wasn’t even mine to begin with, but a black cat that followed me home one day from the little park next to my apartment: all the way down the curved road to my apartment building, and inside of it, until he panicked when i shut the metal door, and wanted out. i thought to myself: (is it fair to take a street cat’s freedom away and confine him to an apartment? does he really prefer regular meals over the leisure of chasing butterflies, and being amongst his own kind?) i let him out.

either way, since i’m going to new york in a week, i decided to wait until i returned to consider adopting this cat - or any cat - but then i found myself obsessing about him, thinking about him day and night, wondering where he was, what he was doing, and if i would ever find him again. so i went out to the same park every morning to look for him - i played with a total of nine black cats. but after a while, i slowly realized, one by one, that none of them were him.

this, of course, made me more obsessive, and the feeling of loss more intense — how can you lose something you never had? — he was a lost cat only to me. and i had only just met him.

*

this morning, i think i found him. i went to the park carrying a plastic bag of chicken hearts, ran three rounds around the park, and saw him in the corner, in a cat shelter, next to a tiny kitten. i did not scoop him up. not yet. in retrospect, it was not so much that i wanted him in my house at this moment, but i wanted to find him, and to be able to find him again.