A shared frequency
Do cats understand love, or is what we call love only instinct—mating, territory, companionship? With Jiujiu, I am not so sure instinct explains everything.
His first love was Beethoven: a golden British Shorthair with a round face and enormous, gentle eyes. There was no awkward adjustment period, no careful learning of each other’s rhythms. They met, and something seemed already decided. Their affection arrived quickly—intense, natural, almost like two small bodies recognising the same signal.
When Beethoven left, Jiujiu changed. For months, he seemed to have misplaced part of himself. He stopped our nightly kneading ritual, as though even comfort had become too heavy to carry. I watched him move through the house with an absence beside him.
Half a year later came Tangyuan: brown-black, fast, agile, and impatient. Their beginning was slower. They learned to coexist, but something never quite opened. Maybe that is chemistry, even in the feline world: some encounters are immediate resonance; others remain only proximity. Not every companion becomes irreplaceable.
I cannot prove that Jiujiu understood love in the human sense. But I saw longing, grief, recognition, and a particular kind of devotion that did not seem interchangeable. Perhaps love is not a word reserved for humans. Perhaps it is simply the moment two beings find themselves tuned, however briefly, to the same hidden frequency.