Remember when my husband said women shed everywhere, just like cats?

I disagree—cat fur and women’s hair are two completely different things. Don’t be misled into thinking just because they look similar and fall every day that there exists any true likeness between them. From beginning to end, human hair is dead. As soon as it lands on the floor, it loses the vitality it once had. Any hair not on a living scalp is a corpse. Cat fur, on the other hand, becomes something entirely new once it leaves the cat’s body.

We don’t measure cat fur by individual strands but in units of clumps. Even tangled together, these hairs are so light, so silky, that they can still tumble through the whole flat. Every single day, cats naturally shed their fur and it floats in the air, light as the fluff from a willow tree.

While only some willow and poplar trees produce catkins, every single kitty that grows fur also sprouts cat fluff. Strictly speaking, these cat-kins are a natural phenomenon, not manufactured. In spring and autumn, cat-kins come particularly thick and fast, drifting around as if they carry cat seeds and must travel to be propagated farther afield.

Cat-kins look beautiful as they skim through the air. They stay aloft for quite some time, then tire and settle down, or simply come to earth when the air currents have stalled. Sometimes they carelessly allow dust to hitch a ride until too many motes pile on and their combined weight sinks the fur.

Seeing the floor covered in cat-kins, Husband carts out the vacuum cleaner to capture them. Most are unable to evade his pursuit, but a few lucky specimens survive to land up in other parts of the flat.

The cat-kins on the floor go unrecognized by Cat. He pays them no attention or else mistakes them for food and tries to eat them. At no point does he seem to understand that they originally came from his own body. And when they knit together into a furball, Cat might get excited enough to bat one around, though even then it’s no more than a toy to him.

Cat produces cat-kins constantly, and the instant one is sent into the world, it loses any memories of its origins. And so amnesiac, desultory cat-kins can only float around at random but will never be able to return to the cat from whence they came.

Most unlucky of all are the cat-kins who get sucked up by the vacuum cleaner right away, their life span no more than a few minutes.

Every cat-kin has a different fate. If they’re lucky, they’re able to pick their moment and struggle free just as the cat passes an open window, escaping into the expanse of the outside world. The next best way out is to cling on to a human’s clothing to be smuggled outdoors whenever that person next leaves the building.

My own clothes are frequently covered in cat-kins, which hang on stubbornly no matter how I try to get rid of them. These little tagalongs broadcast a very particular message, no matter the time or season: hey, everyone, I have a cat. This tends to lead to interesting conversations. Cat-kins don’t annoy me at all—in fact, they make other people like me more, and we inevitably end up chatting happily about cats, because cat lovers deeply appreciate one another. Sometimes I’ll be out when I spot someone else bearing their own cat-kins, and we exchange a knowing smile. As we hang out, the cat-kins detach themselves from our bodies and exchange hosts, so I end up bringing someone else’s cat-kins home, while they’ve done the same to mine. And just like that, these swatches of cat fur have successfully gotten us to transplant them.