“‘A cage went in search of a bird,’ she said.

‘Kafka. What about it?’ I asked her.

‘Well, what the hell does it mean?’

‘A body went in search of a soul.’ I told her, I mean, that’s what it means to me, and so I told her as much, ‘subjectively speaking, of course,’ I added.

She gave me a wry smile, you know, before I met her, I never knew there was such a thing. Always figured it’s something you read about that doesn’t actually exist. Like a ‘haphazard grin’ or something.

‘Everything is subjective,’ she said.

‘Well, of course. We all live in our own realities. We just happen to agree on most of the bits. Every man is an island.’

‘I thought you said no man is an island,’ she quickly replied, oh so wittily, she just has to argue for the sake of argument, you know.”

He looked at me, I gave him my best interested look, it seemed to satisfy him, since he reached for a cigarette and went on talking. My attention, however, was focusing exclusively upon the flash of fire, and the glowing ember it left behind, smoke trailing sensually upward, dancing in the still air.

“‘Because I fucking feel like it,’ she replied.

‘That’s not normal,’ I said, you know, because nobody drinks alone, unless they’re depressed, and depressed people shouldn’t drink at all, because it just makes it worse. So she asks me ‘what’s normal?’ and proceeds with a logical fallacy about how I cannot possibly know what ‘normal’ is.”

His hands make really interesting patterns when he’s talking, the ash slowly collecting at the end of his cigarette, I started wondering when it was going to fall off. He leaned back with his contemplative look, took a long drag, adding a little more ash, blew out the smoke and continued.

“It’s not as if I don’t understand depression. It’s circular, ain’t it? Follows a pattern. Okay, so maybe I don’t understand real depression with chemical imbalances and whatnot, but I do know what getting ditched does to an otherwise normal person. Are you listening?”

I looked up guiltily, widened my eyes in innocence, and nodded.

“Pay attention, this is important,” he shook his head and took another drag. Oh! The ash had already fallen, I looked around the floor for it, another mark on the carpet, there. I wonder if he’s still talking about the same person.

“–and there it was, she did get ditched. It’s like, no matter how different we want to be, in certain ways at least, we’re all basically the same. We all look for meaning in life, thinking that will make us happy. And when we are happy, we see the reason for our happiness as meaning, instead of realising that happiness is meaning, and whatever causes it is incidental. Hell, you can find happiness almost anywhere, if you open your soul to look. So here we have the spoilt brat of a princess, getting ditched for the first time–”

I almost switched off at the word ‘princess’, here we go again, it’s going to be something about an ex-girlfriend…

“–used to getting everything she wants. Falls in love, and now the world is totally perfect. Until he ditches her. She forgets that she has fallen in love before, and she won’t allow herself to fall in love again. Because now, he has, by doing the unthinkable, made himself the epitome of the ideal human male. And the meaning in her life becomes getting him back, except she can’t, so she figures life has no meaning at all, that she will never be happy again. So she’s filled up with frustration and hate, and that becomes her meaning. It’s almost as sad as watching someone turn to religion. Not like I would tell her that, of course, but that’s besides the point.”

He took another long drag, then snuffed the cigarette out in an ashtray. I stretched and tried to listen.

“The point is,” he looked directly at me, “at the end of it all, we’re only human,” finishing with a sagely nod.

I rolled my eyes at him, shrugged, languidly stretched, flexed my claws and went looking for my ball of wool. You are only human, you mean. Cats don’t need meaning, we’re meaning all by our curious selves.