Having cycled through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, upon returning to spring the following year, I abruptly realized I was a person without a cat, a startling discovery.

Why didn’t I have a cat? The question utterly stumped me. I chewed it over from morning to night, at home and out, while eating a meal or strolling down the street, but I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

Many ideas just pop up in our heads, and there’s no way to explain them. Some are passing fancies, which lead to endless weariness and regret. I didn’t want to be one of those people. After all, cats are living things and must be taken seriously. They need to be understood, the way I understood Doughball.

I kept pondering and pondering every second of the day, so consumed I lost my way. As my eyes faded out of focus and the world before me blurred, a gray-white clump wafted before me. I rubbed my eyes, but there it remained. Stepping forward, I took a closer look and almost cried out. It was a stripy dark-gray cat, eyes shut, sound asleep. I clapped a hand over my gaping mouth.

A delicate little kitten, probably born not long ago, round face with slightly puffy cheeks, fur so soft and clean he couldn’t be a stray. He was neither on the ground nor up a tree but suspended in midair, bobbing there quietly like a helium balloon, neither high nor low, close enough that I could reach out and pull him into my embrace.

I hugged the kitten, who remained sound asleep. I stroked his fur and gently kneaded his tiny ears, then rubbed his little claws, quietly inquiring, “And what’s your name? Where do you come from?”

The cat remained fast asleep. I jogged home with him in my arms, hunched over for fear of dropping him. As I opened my front door, his eyelids drifted open but he remained motionless, gazing innocently at me, not showing the least bit of fear.

I went to the kitchen to pour him some milk and watched him lap the bowl dry looking perfectly content. He must have been starving. I fashioned a nest of blankets for him to sleep in with water and dry food nearby. When I turned around, he was curled up between the sofa cushions and had already dozed off. Only now did I understand, as if I’d just awoken from a dream, that there was a cat in my home. All of this happened with such inevitability that I didn’t find any of it odd, and nor did Husband when he came home and saw the kitten. It was as if Cat had always been here.

Husband said he didn’t look like he had come from out of the cat rain, nor did he seem to have grown from the soil. Rather, this was a cat who had been imagined into being and was now real.

Whether Cat had come from my mind or elsewhere, the truth was inescapable: I was now a person who had a cat. An actual cat. As for why I hadn’t had a cat before this, the question no longer seemed important.