I’ll be turning 35 in a few months. And my older cat probably isn’t going to make it that long. I got him when I was 22, back in 2013 when he followed me and my wife home from the neighborhood carpark one day. He was maybe 3 or 4 at the time, which means he’s about 15 now, which is a fairly respectable age for a cat. In the earlier years he was a very warm presence. He liked lying in the sun, and he would squeeze himself between me and my wife whenever we were on the sofa watching TV. In the last year or so, sadly, he’s gone blind, he’s been losing weight, and he’s constantly grimacing and yowling. It’s not how I want to remember him.

Being faced with his mortality got me thinking about my own. I was a moderately morbid child, always reading about disasters and war and so on, and I was very tuned into depressing emo music. I wouldn’t describe it as a ‘just a phase’, I would say it was very important to me and it remains a core thread of who I am, even if I don’t talk about it very often, and even if it doesn’t actually surface very much, either. The lotus of my optimism grew out of a very thick, dark mud of despair. When I was a teenager, there were a couple of times I was so depressed I didn’t think I was going to make it to 30. Music was one of the few things that kept me afloat. I was a huge Radiohead fan when I was about 15.

I generally never cared much for birthdays. I remember one year I pleaded with my mum for a copy of SimCity 3000, I must’ve been 9. I remember when I turned 18 I wrote a one-line post on my LiveJournal saying “they can now legally hang me”. I was quite excited to get to buy alcohol and cigarettes, but once it was legal I think half of the thrill of it dissipated for me. but the I remember for my 21st birthday I wanted to hang out with my friends, but my mum had bought a cake and invited family over and she chewed me out for being a little late. I remember being frustrated at how my threshold crossing into ‘the age of independence’ was marred by a reminder of my obligations to my family. I think my 20th birthday was a fun one with friends. I don’t really remember any of the others. I got married at 22, and in the years that followed, I never really…