Sometimes I wonder what it feels like to not belong to anyone. I mean, really—not in the poetic, Instagram kind of way, but in the raw sense of sleeping under parked cars and licking raindrops off rusted pipes. I see cats like that all the time. One day they’re curled on the hood of a hot car, the next they’re not. And nobody asks. No one posts a missing flyer. They vanish like dreams you forget before you even wake up.
Back in my neighborhood, there's this black cat that watches everyone from a rooftop. Never comes down. Just sits there like a silent little god surveying his kingdom of broken glass and laundry lines. He’s sleek, like he was born knowing things the rest of us are too distracted to notice. I once saw him jump from a three-story drop like it was nothing. If lives were poker chips, he’s probably already played through half of his.
Don’t get me wrong, not every cat out there’s hustling survival like it’s a full-time job. Some get lucky. They land in cozy apartments with soft blankets and a human who calls them "baby" more often than their actual partner. You can tell those ones by how they walk—tails high, no twitch, eyes slow-blinking like they’ve got nowhere to be and all the time to get there. I used to think that kind of comfort made them soft. Now I think it just makes them safe.
Every now and then, I catch a photo of one. You know, those street shots someone takes without posing, just honest moments. A calico with haunted eyes staring down a staircase, or a kitten with whiskers so long they look like antennae tuning into a kinder world. It's weird how much you can feel from a still image. Like the photo holds a silence you can almost hear. Some of those cats look like they've seen more than I ever will.
Zipping past them on the sidewalk, most people never notice. They’re too busy scrolling or rushing to be late somewhere. But these cats—they carry stories. Some are born wild, some get thrown into it. Others escape something worse. And yeah, maybe they’re not all fighters or philosophers or anything like that. But every single one is alive in a world that barely makes room for them. That’s something. That’s everything.
