Monochrome.

You were less than a handful when you arrived, but over the years the little monochrome furball snowballed into a robust seven kilograms of beauty and short temper.

Net consumer of chicken and small pieces of cheese; nemesis of carpets and furniture; skidding helter-skelter across grass and linoleum even in your 13th year. I contemplate you in amusement, your seniority not yet taking the edge from the astonishment you feel at being alive.

You took ill earlier this week; a minor jolt in our shared lives. Recovery has been swift and decisive. Now the pendulum-like predictability has been resumed - the small squeak of my bedroom door that causes me to half-wake in sleepy confusion; the long pause which convinces me I'm mistaken; the slow descent back into unconsciousness punctured by the landing of your airborne body on the edge or middle of the mattress.

The light of just-gone six in the morning reflecting from your sometimes-yellow, sometimes-green eyes; the rolling-up of my limbs to help you find an uncluttered path from one end of the bed to the other; the gleeful turning of your tiny engine even before I reach out to touch you.

I never seriously worried that the vets would take you from me this week. That day is long in the future judging by your present weight, disposition and activity levels. But it must come one day. Your mortality is as inevitable as anything else's, your destiny the impromptu ossuary under my grandmother's apple tree alongside two other cats, two dogs and one rabbit.

Like a child, I cry: I hate that everything I hold dear has to leave me. To live at all is to be transitory; accumulating beings of significance and beauty which are always left behind as existence arrows relentlessly forward in linear time. Or you leave them.

My seven kilograms, my headlong black-and-white flash, my stripe from the infinite rainbow of nature. You sleep peacefully on the stair next to my door, and you have no inkling of your own significance.