“Ainaa Hafizah binti Azhar, saya daripada MPH bookstore”
-”Er, ya?”
“Awak ada order buku?”
“Er. Tak, kut.”
-”Ya, ada.”
“Eh. Takde. Buku apa ni?”
-”Entah lah. Dalam plastic”, and he went on, “awak ada dekat rumah?”
To this I answered “Haaah. APA?!”

About three hours later I arrived home and there it was, three books daintily stacked on the sofa; one of them with a cheque with my name printed across.

I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard my mother acknowledge my writing, and it was rather funny how she tried to narrate what it was about to my father, to whom this must seem completely foreign.

Flipping through, cringe-worthy would be the biography section, while most people wrote about growing up liking Narnia and C.S Lewis, the younger me pontificated my love of prose and Nabokov. I’m afraid I may have come a bit as being up my own arse.

It’s a rather queer feeling though, reading something you wrote at 15. Trying to decipher how in God’s name did you ever possess so much passion and eidetic flair, when three years later you find yourself with a dumbed down level of college English, over-using phrases like like y’know, and yeah, exactly.

I’ve only been able to read a few of the other stories so far, but dear sordid blog reader, do rest assured that despite them omitting one line, that being the title of this post, I was the only 15 year old of the whole anthology who incorporated a graphic – though somewhat romantic- depiction of sex and -heavily implied- homosexuality, subtly enough to be published by a Malaysian bookstore.

Hehe. Now, some things never change.

We no longer argue for separate territories on the sofa or give each other the evil eye, let alone feign ignorance of each other’s existence.

In fact, over these past few months our understanding of each other has grown ten-fold. We sometimes sit down next to each other and I find myself telling him about my problems, all of them; and sometimes I even bother sitting down on the kitchen floor to feed him. He would come and bite my arm as I lie around the house reading – more Murakami, naturally – and plop himself next to me; like an old friend.

In fact, I no longer feel threatened by my cat, and all past fantasies of stabbing him repeatedly with the kitchen knife – out of annoyance – have completely left me.

Murakami has probably done for the understanding of the feline race as much as what Simone de Beauvoir has done for feminism. While “The Second Sex” was a catalytic work of literature that inspired millions of women to take charge of their own sexuality; Haruki Murakami and his prolific of short-stories and novels have made millions of us literature reading humans realize that cats are not mere creatures who eat fish and sleep in our beds. Amongst other things, his books have made us aware that cats understand fields of meteorology that humans are unbeknownst to and that the feline form is able to comprehend much more about socioeconomics and politics than we are aware of.

Quite similar to how my ongoing delay in reading anything by Germaine Greer on the subject of feminism; I have yet to read Nastume Sōseki’s “I Am A Cat”, and of this I am quite ashamed.

Rest assured, all intention of obtaining a copy is still existent and going strong, as is all determination to further understand the intellectual sentiments of my cat.

Ask yourself a question my friends, are YOU suffering from a bad case of miscommunication between you and your cat? Do you silence your qualms and worries about each other by merely feeding your partner (read: cat) an extra portion of tuna rather than address the situation at hand?

Then read something, anything by Haruki Murakami; and save your relationship with your cat.