“Humans are strange creatures.”
Cabbage must have finished grooming himself. He looked in my direction as he spoke.
“What’s that?”
“Why do humans give flowers names?”
“That’s because there are so many different kinds. Without names you wouldn’t be able to differentiate between them.”
“Just because there are different kinds it doesn’t mean you have to name each and every one. Why not just call them all flowers? Isn’t that good enough?”
I suppose he was right. Why do people name flowers anyway? And flowers aren’t the only thing. We give names to all kinds of objects. Colors have names and so do people. Why do we need names?
It’s the same with time. The sun comes up and it goes down. Humans went and imposed their own system of months and years, hours and minutes, on what was a natural phenomenon. Then we gave all those things names. And that’s all that time is.
Cabbage existed in a world without time. No clocks, no schedules, and no being late. And no such thing as categorizing people according to age or what year they are in school. And no vacations because there’s nothing to have a vacation from in the first place. There’s just the changes brought about by natural phenomena, and our physical response—like when you’re hungry or sleepy.
In a world with no clocks, I could take my time and think about things. It seemed to me that there were all kinds of rules made up by human beings—rules that begin to fall apart when you look at them closely. I find myself coming to the realization that the ways we have of measuring things—like, say, temperature, or the reflection of light that produces color—are artificial human creations, just like time. Basically humans just applied labels to the things they sensed. From the perspective of the non-human world, hours, minutes, and seconds don’t exist. Nor do colors like red, yellow, and blue. And temperature doesn’t exist. But on the other hand, if yellow and red don’t exist, does that mean Cabbage doesn’t think dandelions are pretty, or that roses are beautiful?
“But you know, Cabbage, it was really sweet of Mom to go along on those long walks with you.”
“How so?”
“Spending all this time with you was a big deal for her. Mom was really fond of you.”
“Mom, you say?”
“My mother. I guess she was kind of your mother too.”
“Exactly who is this person you refer to as ‘mother’?”
I was speechless.
Cabbage must have forgotten about Mom.
But that’s impossible. Or on the other hand, maybe he’d made himself forget about her.
I remembered my mother’s face the day she rescued Cabbage. She looked a bit sad, and yet she was also so happy. She would watch TV with Cabbage curled up on her lap, stroking him until he fell asleep. Then she would fall asleep too, tucked up with Cabbage on the sofa. She looked so peaceful. I got choked up thinking about it.
“Don’t you remember Mother?”
“Who is it you speak of?”
Cabbage had the look of someone who was wondering what the hell I was talking about. He really must have forgotten about her. It suddenly hit me how sad this was. Cabbage’s complete innocence just made me feel worse. I guess somewhere deep down I always believed those stories about animals that never forget their master, like in the story of Hachikō, who for years waited at the station for his master to come home, without realizing his master had died…
But I wonder if that’s just wishful thinking on the part of humans. Would Cabbage forget about me soon, too? Would there come a day when I disappeared from Cabbage’s world?
All the moments I’d lived through, more or less without thinking about it, began to feel very important. How many more walks would I be able to take with Cabbage? With the amount of time I had left, how many more times would I be able to listen to my favorite music? To enjoy a cup of coffee, a good meal? To say good morning, sneeze or laugh?
I’d never thought about life this way before. It hadn’t crossed my mind during any of my visits to my mother. If I’d realized that someday it would all have to end, I would have appreciated the time I spent with her more. Before I knew it Mom was gone. She died before any of these things had occurred to me.
Had I done anything significant during my thirty-year existence? Had I spent time with the people I really wanted to spend time with? Had I said all that needed to be said to the people who mattered?
There was a time when I could have called my mother, but my mind was always on my mobile’s recent call history. I was so busy dealing with what happened to come up at any given moment that I left all the important things for later.
I got so caught up with all the little everyday things that I ended up wasting the time I could have spent on more important things. But the scariest thing is that I never even noticed that I was wasting my precious time. If only I’d stopped for a moment to get some perspective, away from all that busy running around. It would have been obvious what the most important thing was, and which of those calls (if any) really mattered.
I looked at Cabbage.
While I’d been thinking, he’d curled up and gone to sleep on the bench. With his four white feet tucked in and folded under his black and grey fur, he looked like a perfectly round throw-pillow. I stroked him and felt his little heart beating away. It was almost unbelievable that such a life force flowed through this small creature, as he lay there so still, sleeping peacefully.
I’ve heard it said a mammal’s heart beats around two billion times during its lifetime. The life expectancy of, for example, an elephant, is about fifty years. For horses it’s twenty years, and cats ten years, while a mouse will last only for about two years.
But whatever the average lifespan, all of their hearts beat around two billion times. The average life expectancy of a human being is seventy years. I wondered if my heart had beaten two billion times.
My whole life up to this point, I’d faced what I thought was an infinite tomorrow. But once I discovered that my life would indeed end, it felt more like the future was coming to meet me. Now I found myself heading toward a future that was set in stone. At least, that’s how I felt.
How ironic. For the first time in my life I was taking a long hard look at my future, but only after being told that I didn’t have long to live.
The right side of my head began to hurt and I was finding it difficult to breathe.
I didn’t want to die yet. I wanted to go on living.
So tomorrow I’d once again make something disappear from the world.
Which is to say, something would have to disappear from my future, so that I might live longer.
Cabbage slept on.
The park had emptied of children and the sun had moved further and further toward the west. Cabbage finally woke up. He stretched as far as he could without falling off the bench and let out a great yawn, which he seemed to take his time recovering from. Cabbage stared at me lazily.
“I say, shall we go now?”
Cabbage, still groggy from just having woken up, spoke in a pretty condescending tone, addressing no one in particular. He jumped down from the bench and sauntered off with his usual jaunty stride.
Cabbage headed toward the street that led to the station, through the shopping district. He stopped in front of a soba shop and gave a loud meow. The shop owner emerged with a handful of bonito flakes left over from the day’s batch of soup stock, which they served with the noodles. Once he’d polished off his winnings, Cabbage licked his chops and walked off, muttering “excellent” under his breath as he went. With this kind of behavior it was difficult to tell who was the master and who was the pet.