Nate Hunter

 

The story of my cat is an interesting one. In her free time, my mother buys, renovates, and sells houses in order to make some extra money. One day, she took me to a house she was renovating. When I was there, a grey cat with yellow eyes and tears on their face walked up to me and sat down in front of my feet. I was very confused and I asked my mother about this cat. She said she didn’t know about the cat, so we took him to the vet to see if he had a chip inside him that was put in by his owner. It turns out that he did, and we learned that he was owned by the person who previously owned the house, a musician who abandoned him there. The most insulting part, however, is that he decided to name the cat “Grey Cat”. This act of inhumanity enraged me and my mother, and we decided to take the cat into our care. I named him Nermal, and he has taken on that name with pride. This was two years ago, and he has been a part of our family ever since.

 

Nermal is very antisocial, and he didn’t warm up to me until a while after we first met. I believe he acts like this because of how his old owner treated him. I also believe this why whenever I play piano or guitar, Nermal gets very scared and tries to go outside to get away from the music. Whenever he is reminded of his old owner, he gets very stressed out and it makes me feel a lot of sympathy for him. This hasn’t stopped Nermal from doing what he wants to do. Every day for the past two years, I have let him out into our neighborhood and he has since made it his. He is very good at making his way around the land near our house, seeing as I can count on one hand how many times he hasn’t come home at night. He knows his way around the neighborhood, and he has since the first day we brought him here. Nermal is an incredibly smart cat, with him being able to turn on tap water by himself, or him being able to navigate very well, no matter how unfamiliar with the terrain he is.

 

Some days, we take him to my grandmother’s house. This does not stop him from going outside and exploring however, as he also explores my grandmother’s neighborhood and knows it very well. Nermal is an explorer at heart, always going into the wild but being back by dusk. Nermal has become an important part of our family, with him being like a brother to me despite his usual passive-aggressive attitude. Nermal is an old cat, and it is likely that he’ll be gone very soon. This makes me enjoy my time with him even more, because when you know you will lose something, you appreciate it more. No cat will ever be able to replace him, and I’m sure he knows this well.