Imagine being an animal. No one tells you about the past. No one tells you what to expect in the future. Your whole knowledge bank is based on your own experience. And as you are experiencing those things you can't tell anyone about the experiences and no one can tell you what's happening. It sounds kind of scary because we know such a different experience, but if that's all you ever know I think it also sounds kind of easy. You just take life as it comes.
If you're one of my cats, you grow up with a lot of other cats. You deal. You live with tortoises and they're not weird, they're family. Well, they're moving yard art at least. Kids are terrifying though, lol. You see where I'm going. You know what you know and accept it just as life.
What if you saw or heard things? And no one ever told you it wasn't real? No one ever said it was your imagination? What if you could sense a cat who used to live here? Maybe you know they aren't alive like the other cats but they're something else that's just as real. It's just a different state. What if there was a person living in your house, er, well, residing anyway, and you liked them even though they never fed you? How different would your life be if no one had ever told you that it's just a dream or you're just hearing things?
I've had cats show different signs of experiencing the house differently than me. Some are more interested in it than others.
The cat in the picture is Marchello. He's the third in a line of four black, fluffy, male, stripy cats I've had since I was 11. I felt like he knew the others, knew he had a job as a leggacy cat (what I call cats that I MUST have, and a play on my name). He left me in 2020 and I got the next leggacy cat a month later. Gustavo has a nice smattering of characteristics of the others along with his own personality traits. I feel like these boys look out for eachother and look out for me, guiding the new ones on what it means to live the leggacy.