Some relationships begin with dinner, a phone number, a few promises made too soon, and a questionable amount of wine.
Then there are the ones where a four-pound creature walks into your life, looks at you as though you are plainly beneath him, occupies half the house without contributing to expenses, and unilaterally decides that from now on you will live in his service.
Welcome to love.
The feline kind, at least.
In the first photograph he was still small. That age when cats seem to have a head too large for their body, two enormous eyes, and absolute certainty that everything in existence was put there to be sniffed, knocked over, scratched, or conquered.
I photographed him and he watched me.
Probably thinking:
What the fuck does this asshole with the black thing in front of his face want from me?
A fair question.
Then he grew.
His face became more serious. His gaze more knowing. He learned the strategic points of the house, the proper hours for demanding food, and that sophisticated form of psychological terrorism by which a cat can obtain anything simply by staring at you long enough.
And I kept photographing him.
Not because it was a project.
Not because I needed to build a series.
Not because anyone was going to pay me.
Simply because he was there.
And because, without realizing it, photographing him had become a way of spending time together.
Me with the camera.
Him minding his own damn business.
An adult relationship, in other words.
Cats have a terrible reputation when it comes to affection.
They are said to be opportunists.
And it’s true.
They love you much more just after you’ve opened a can. They follow you with touching devotion when there is a real possibility that something might fall from the table. They can ignore you for four hours and suddenly appear the moment you sit in the exact spot where they had decided to sleep.
They are not dogs.
They don’t wait at the door with the enthusiasm of someone who has just discovered you survived a war.
A cat often sees you come in, opens half an eye, and seems to think:
Oh. You’re back.
Then goes back to sleep.
And yet there is something profoundly honest in that.
A cat doesn’t perform.
He doesn’t do public relations.
He doesn’t construct a better version of himself to persuade you to want him in your life.
He has no interest in being charming.
He doesn’t worry about whether you like him.
He has no strategy.
He is what he is.
If he wants to be with you, he comes.
If he wants to be alone, he disappears.
If he wants to be petted, he lets you know.
If he’s had enough, you may discover it through a rather persuasive set of claws.
Terribly simple.
Terribly healthy.
We human beings, meanwhile, have turned affection into an Olympic sport.
We say one thing while thinking another.
We want someone and pretend we don’t.
We miss someone and wait for them to write first.
We measure messages.
We interpret silences.
We devise romantic strategies like generals commanding an army made entirely of emotionally traumatized idiots.
Not the cat.
When he feels like it, the cat climbs up beside you.
That’s it.
No preliminary meeting.
No ‘we need to figure out what we are.’
No analysis of their last-seen status on WhatsApp.
He comes.
Settles in.
He may even put his ass in your face, because poetry has its limits.
But he stays.
And in the end, that is what matters.
Staying.
Not necessarily forever.
Not suffocating each other.
Not becoming one of those couples who even share oxygen and after six months can no longer remember which one used to have a personality.
Staying while still knowing how to leave.
Cats understand this much better than we do.
They spend hours away.
They explore.
Sleep wherever they please.
Build private universes you will never know anything about.
Then, at some point, they return.
And when they return, you don’t need to ask where they’ve been.
You don’t have to interrogate them.
You don’t have to demand proof.
They came back.
That’s enough.
Perhaps love ought to look a little more like this.
Presence without possession.
Affection without imprisonment.
The freedom to be elsewhere without ceasing, in some strange way, to belong to one another.
Of course, I am taking relationship lessons from an animal who may decide at four in the morning to race down the hall as if chased by the Antichrist, so take all this with appropriate caution.
But they do have something to teach us.
Because an animal doesn’t love you for what you own.
He doesn’t care how much you earn.
He doesn’t know what you do for a living.
He hasn’t seen your résumé.
He doesn’t give a damn whether you failed, embarrassed yourself, whether someone finds you interesting, or whether the algorithm decided your work deserves to be shown to no one today.
To him, you are you.
The one who opens the door.
The one who fills the bowl, certainly.
But also the one whose presence has become part of his world.
The smell.
The voice.
The sounds.
The habits.
The place on the couch.
The hand that knows the exact spot behind his ear.
It sounds like little.
In truth, it is almost everything.
There is a photograph where he stands on the low wall, still young, intent on something I probably cannot even see.
In another he sits there composed, front paws together, wearing the face of an old professor disappointed by the mediocrity of his students.
And then there is a more recent one, stretched among the plants, perfectly at ease in the world.
Three moments.
The same cat.
Different time.
And this is where photographs do their usual dirty work.
They remind you that everything changes while you’re busy not noticing.
Animals grow.
They age.
They change.
We change with them.
One day they are almost small enough to fit in your hand, and the next you watch them sleeping in their favorite corner and wonder when the fuck all those years went by.
Time is a polite thief.
It doesn’t break down the door.
It takes one day at a time.
So you don’t notice.
Then you open an old photograph and discover what it carried away.
Perhaps that is another reason I keep taking pictures.
Because the living things we love have the annoying habit of not being eternal.
Neither are we.
We cannot preserve them.
We can only preserve evidence of them.
An expression.
A look.
An absurd position.
An insignificant day that many years later may become anything but insignificant.
Photography is full of this cruel magic.
It freezes something while knowing perfectly well that outside the image, it will keep changing.
With an animal this becomes even clearer.
Because he doesn’t know what you’re doing.
He doesn’t know that photograph may become a memory someday.
He doesn’t know you’re trying to hold on to an instant.
He is simply alive.
Perhaps that is the best lesson of all.
To be alive without constantly worrying about proving it.
We have turned life into permanent documentation of life.
We photograph lunch.
The gym.
The trip.
The relationship.
The sunset.
Happiness.
Sometimes we seem more concerned with producing evidence that we’re living than with actually living.
The cat sleeps.
Eats.
Goes out.
Watches an insect for twenty minutes as though it were the most important thing in the universe.
Lies in the sun.
Feels no need to turn it into content.
Magnificent bastard.
Perhaps love itself begins with something like that.
A presence.
One life meets another and, for some reason biology can explain until it becomes tedious, decides that presence matters.
We could reduce everything to hormones, instinct, survival of the species.
We would probably even be right.
But it would be a terribly poor explanation for something that has built practically everything worth remembering.
We have children for love.
We stay beside someone for love.
We leave for love.
We return for love.
We write songs, books, embarrassing letters, and two-in-the-morning messages we wish we could erase from human history the next day.
We care for someone.
An animal.
A person.
A place.
Even an object that belonged to someone no longer here.
We call an enormous number of different things love because no word can probably contain them all.
And maybe love is the trick life uses to convince us to endure everything else.
Disappointment.
Work.
Loss.
Useless days.
Fear.
The fairly terrifying thought that sooner or later it will all end.
What would be the point of making it through this mess if there weren’t something, someone, capable now and then of making the journey less absurd?
Sometimes that someone is a person.
Sometimes it’s a gray-and-white cat who spends more than half the day ignoring you.
It doesn’t matter.
Love has never had much respect for hierarchies.
Perhaps that’s for the best.
I like to think that every time I photograph him, a small conversation passes between us.
I look at him through the lens.
He looks at me.
I think about light, depth of field, the position of his eyes.
He is probably thinking:
Are you done, asshole?
Then perhaps he comes closer.
Lets me pet him.
Stays a few minutes.
And in those moments you realize that most of the things we consider enormously important are, to use the technical term, bullshit.
An animal restores the proper proportions.
He’s hungry.
He eats.
He’s tired.
He sleeps.
He wants company.
He looks for you.
He needs to be alone.
He leaves.
No philosophy.
And yet, paradoxically, he seems to have understood something we insist on complicating.
Life does not always have to be conquered.
Sometimes it simply has to be inhabited.
With someone beside you.
Even if that someone mostly minds his own damn business.
In fact, perhaps especially then.
Because loving someone doesn’t necessarily mean having them constantly nearby.
It means knowing they exist.
Recognizing the place they have taken in your days.
Noticing how the house changes when you don’t hear them moving.
How certain habits no longer belong only to you.
How one part of your life, quietly, has four paws, two yellow eyes, and no intention of thanking you for buying the most expensive brand of kibble.
And that’s fine.
Because the most beautiful forms of love often keep no accounts.
They don’t record who gave more.
They don’t ask for receipts.
They don’t present a bill.
They happen.
They remain.
And sometimes they stare at you from atop a wall as if they know perfectly well something you, poor over-evolved human, are still trying to understand.
Perhaps we will never truly know why we are here.
Perhaps all our philosophies, religions, and grand theories are merely sophisticated attempts to make the mystery bearable.
But if I have to choose a good-enough explanation, I like this one:
perhaps life creates more life because it wants to keep having something to love.
And perhaps we are here, at least in part, to do the same.
To love someone.
Care for them.
Let them be free.
Let ourselves be loved in the way they know how.
And keep a few photographs along the way, because someday we may need to remember how beautiful it was to have that little bastard beside us.
