He was my furball, my cat in the hat, my puss in boots, my key to furry friends. He was my companion through my sloth and my joblesness, my playmate when I was bored, my guardian when I was all alone in the night, the feeling of loneliness esp exacerbated after watching a horrifying movie. I've always thought him to be a reincarnation of Lorien, his birthday being on the month Lorien was to be born. Though this thought I kept to myself, not wanting to remind Mamuy of Lorien's "wait."
Ming-ming was a royal cat in a lot of ways. Always watchful of his hygiene, Ming-ming was never dirty, except perhaps a few weeks before his death, the weeks I started working. He was, as I rightly thought, calling for attention, as he promptly started cleaning himself up after I started paying attention to him again. Always disciplined, Ming-ming never pooped nor peed anywhere else except where we trained him to poo or pee. He doesn't snitch food off the table, except at times when the smell of it is unbearably strong, as in the case of: F-I-S-H.
Ming-ming got so humanlike he's even in my friendster!
It was the 2nd day of our ABAY, what I call: hell's welcome for us newbies fresh from product training. I was stressed to death trying to catch up with my call per SR ratio when my cellphone started vibrating inside my pocket. I impatiently turned it off, thinking at first that Mamuy was just giving me a missed call, when it rang again. I went out of the floor to take the call when I heard Mamuy's sobs loudly through the other line. In that instant I thought something had happened to Mamuy. But what she said next shocked the daylights out of me.
I left home with our cat alive and seriously fat-assed and I came home never seeing him again.
Our neighbor's dogs mauled or frightened Ming-ming to death when he fell off the concrete fence bordering our window and the house nearby. Either way, I never saw Ming-ming again, the neighbor telling Mamuy they'd just bury him in their backyard. Although I wanted so much to ask for his body, where would we bury him in our four-walled room? All that came back of him was his collar and his tag, which we even had engraved with his name. The collar is still there on the cupboard, gathering dust. I don't want it washed, hoping that in the near-future, when I'm rich enough, I can have Ming-ming cloned.
When Meow was lost, Mamuy and I felt sad. Mamuy even more forlorn than I was, roaming the streets for a couple of days trying to search for Meow. I felt the same way when we got the news of Lorien. Something in the pit of my stomach seemed lost. And I'm not referring to food I've eaten then digested. Although in Meow's case, attachment made the lost more "real." As we had Meow with us for a couple of months. Meow also fell on that concrete fence where Ming-ming fell.
But back when we lost Meow, we never thought him to be dead, me being the more optimistic of the two of us, always telling Mamuy that Meow would someday come back to us when he's old enough to climb the fence. The news of Ming-ming's death shattered that hope. Then, surely as the sun rising East, I knew then that Meow never had a chance when he fell that fence. What happened to Ming-ming happened to him as well, and Meow being so small. My heart was crushed for poor Meow.
I've never experienced death in the family. Not so close, nor not so real. But three deaths in the span of one year -- I can hardly believe my luck is still holding. They were our budding family, me and Mamuy's. Whatever life throws at me next, I will always count my family that way.
On this day I remember them.
Lorien, first of my heart and Mamuy's. The unborn child of our dreams. She who waited for a breath of life and never got it.
Meow, our little warrior. The fierce kitten who wouldn't let us near him even when he was shivering and starving to death in front of Edsa Central Mall.
Ming-ming, the start of our "pet collecting." I don't know what made me urge Mamuy to pick him up that day we say him downstairs, at the garage of the compound where we were living, but I never regretted that day. I know now that what I felt for him was neither pity nor duty, but destiny.
Our lives are more intertwined than you can imagine. Somehow, my theory that Ming-ming was our dear Lorien reborn keeps on strengthening. Not a week after Ming-ming's death, Mamuy and I had this joyful news.
In the recess of my mind, I will never run out of names to give. I give our cats "unique" names, and I name our kids-to-be the way Ged was named. It is in the naming, Le Guin says, where all power resides, and it is in my names where I derive my faith in an all-encompassing fate. I am never more sure of my future than in this.
This will ring very eerie, but I will repeat it again: For every life, there is un-life. For every certainty, a certain randomness in our lives..
Die Ming-ming did. But wasn't he just reborn from Lorien? And isn't Harion now just Ming-ming's soul again? As Mamuy said: maybe he died to make way for Harion.
Or maybe he never died at all.
In my unpublished book, The Butterfly, the protagonist's mother dies but her soul is never gone but comes back where all life flows from: back to earth. To be the flowers, the grass, the soil beneath the protagonist's feet.
Life I said is beautiful. But never can we experience it more sweetly than when we are in pain. Thus, in Ming-ming's anguished cries before he died, I think upon this:
Isn't it just eerie I wrote all about this today?
As if..
I'm not like all those other writers out there who write for the sake of the "theme." I can't even force myself to write even when I want to. All I'm just saying is serendipity rules my life more fully than anyone can ever imagine.
I'm not even wondering anymore if my life is an unfinished chapter. I know with a certainty stronger than death that it is more than written. It is bound in leather, and gilded in chains, written by the master macabre writer of all time.
And hey, it isn't me!
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