I finally read Butch, the cat’s mind. It wasn’t mystical or complicated.

More about I finally read Butch, the cat’s mind. It wasn’t mystical or complicated.

I Finally Read Butch, the Cat’s Mind

I used to think the cat was just a cat. Orange in daylight, shadow at night. He sat on the windowsill like an old thinker who’d said everything worth saying and decided to let silence handle the rest. He belonged to the landlady, I guess. Or maybe nobody. He simply existed the way the cracked sidewalk did: stubborn and unchanging.

He watched me come home with small groceries and smaller ambitions. Watched me sit at the table like I was waiting for someone to ring a bell and tell me the round was over. Cats don’t blink much, so when he stared it felt like judgment and mercy sharing the same chair.

Then one afternoon something shifted. Maybe loneliness got tired of hinting. Maybe the day was strange enough to allow it. I sat on the floor with him. For the first time, I didn’t see fur and whiskers. I saw intention. A slow river of thought.

It wasn’t words. Cats don’t bother with words. It was meaning that arrived like weather.

You build cages and decorate them, his mind said without sound. Then you sit inside and call it fate.

I told him I didn’t build cages. I just lived in the kind they hand out at discount. He leaned into my knee and showed me pictures: a man circling his own life like a moth refusing to leave the light; a hallway of doors all labeled “later.”

Then he showed his own life. A kitten under a porch in the rain. A pair of hands lifting him. Bowls, windowsills, repeated small goodness. Not rescue. Awakened into luck. That was the feeling.

He looked at me: Why can’t you do that? Who told you you’re not allowed?

I wanted to explain rent and gravity and how hope bruises. He already knew.

Stop rehearsing sorrow, he thought. It is not your job.

Outside the world clattered along, ordinary and loud. Inside, we sat in a quiet that felt almost dignified. The universe didn’t love or hate me. It just let me be, which was somehow kind enough.

Eat when you’re hungry. Rest when you’re tired. Sit in sunlight when it appears. Do what life asks, not what fear orders.

He stretched like a cathedral being slowly built, then returned to the window. I stood beside him. Cars. Clouds. People trying to carry invisible weights. Maybe we all were.

He turned back once more.

You are not finished, his eyes said. Stop pretending you are a conclusion.

Something untied inside me. Not a miracle—just a small repair. I didn’t become extraordinary. I didn’t figure everything out. But I stopped narrating my life like a failure already carved in stone.

That night dinner tasted like food again. The walk around the block felt like being allowed back into the world.


It just said:

Be alive while you have the privilege.