If Cats Disappeared From the World

That’s what some people say, but I tend to disagree. When a person becomes aware of their impending death, they have to make a compromise between the life they wish they could have led, and the reality of death. Sure there are all the little regrets, the broken dreams, but you have to go easy on yourself, and be flexible. Having had the chance to make things disappear from the world in order to gain just one more day of life, I’ve come to realize that there’s a certain beauty in those regrets. Because it’s proof of having lived. I won’t eliminate anything more from the world. And I may regret it at the moment I actually die, but that’s OK with me. No matter how you look at it, life is full of regrets anyway.

Cats and humans have been partners for over ten thousand years. And what you realize when you’ve lived with a cat for a long time is that we may think we own them, but that’s not the way it is. They simply allow us the pleasure of their company.”

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.

Humans have even felt the need to wrap their bodies up in time.
But now I think I get it.
With freedom comes uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety.
Human beings exchanged their freedom for the sense of security that comes from living by rules and routines—despite knowing that costs them their freedom.

After the credits, life goes on. My hope is that my life would go on in someone’s memory.

If my life were a movie, what kind of a movie would it be? Would it be a comedy, a thriller, or maybe more of a drama? Whatever it would be, it definitely wouldn’t be a romantic comedy!

If my life were a film, it would have to find a way of showing my changing perspective. That’s to say, how I see my own life has changed over time. I would feel affection for scenes that I’d hated before, and laugh during scenes where I’d originally cried. The past love interest is now long forgotten.
What I’m remembering now are all the good times I had with my mother and father. Only the good times…

I suppose you could say that my life is like that photograph. A movie that shows my whole life, the comedy and the tragedy. But if you put that all into one still photo, all that would be left is a blank screen. All the joy, anger, and sorrow I’ve been through, and the result is that my life shows up as nothing more than a blank movie screen. There’s nothing there, nothing left. Only an empty blank space.

Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after a long time, it makes a totally different impression than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed. It’s you that’s changed, and seeing the same film again makes that impossible to forget.

If you’re trying to separate out the countless “meaningless things” in the world from everything else, you’ll eventually have to make a judgment about human beings, about our existence. In my case, I suppose it’s all the movies I’ve seen, and the memories I have of them that give my life meaning. They’ve made me who I am.
To live means: to cry and shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to even experience horrible, frightening things… and to laugh. Beautiful songs, beautiful scenery, feeling nauseous, people singing, planes flying across the sky, the thundering hooves of horses, mouth-watering pancakes, the endless darkness of space, cowboys firing their pistols at dawn…
And next to all the movies that play on a loop inside me, sit the images of friends, lovers, the family, who were with me when I watched them. Then there are the countless films that I’ve recorded in my own imagination—the memories that run through my head, which are so beautiful, they bring tears to my eyes.