text: Your cat just starts talking to you one day and you’re amazed at that fact, but after a few minutes you realize your cat is kind of boring and doesn’t have many interesting things to say, which really disappoints you because you’d think a talking cat would have lots of cool things to share. Instead, he spends an hour and a half talking to you about a piece a cheese he found on the floor one day, and the difference between cheese you find on the floor and cheese you find on the rug, and how it took him a while to eat it because he wasn’t sure if it would be good but then decided that it would be but then wasn’t sure but then decided that, yeah, he should eat the cheese and so he does and the point of the story turns out to be that the cheese was kind of stuck to the floor when he did go and eat it but he got it loose. That’s it. And before you can leave the room to do something else, the cat says that he’s working on a screenplay, well not exactly working on it but thinking about working on it one of these days, and before you know it you’ve spent another two hours listening to him talk about how sometimes he likes thinking about it and sometimes he doesn’t and the best times of the day for thinking about it, and how he wishes he had fingers because then he could type it out. Nowhere in any of what he says does he even mention what the screenplay is about. After a while you just stop him in the middle of his sentence and say it’s been really great talking to him but you have to go to the kitchen and eat lunch, but then the cat says he’ll join you, and on the way there he tells you about a dream he had last night where there was a grape but the grape was kind of someone’s house but only a few times and how he kept on eating things in it but it never tasted like grapes like he thought it would, it always tasted like wood. As you put the sandwich together, the cat is telling you about how this one time he thought he saw someone through the window and how he looked out the window and saw that actually no one was there and he had just seen some sort of trick of the light or something. As you eat the sandwich, the cat talks about the different kinds of dust in the house, like carpet dust and under-the-couch dust and corner dust and top-of-high-things dust and how all of them are different but none of them taste very good because he’s tried and no matter what you just can’t make it tasty even though you’d think it would taste great because it really smells great too, but it doesn’t. You have no idea what he’s talking about but once you finish the sandwich you take it to sink and say that it was great having lunch with him but you have to do some homework, and the cat says that it’s summer vacation, and you say you want to get a head start on it, and before he can say anything back you run to your room and close the door. A few minutes later, you hear the cat outside. Through the door he asks how the homework is going and before you can even say anything back he starts going on and on about how cats don’t have homework but that they still learn a lot just being around the house, like how one time he found a cashew and thought it was one big thing but then he swatted it with his paw and it split into two smaller things and how this completely surprised him, and then went into how he began seeing if other things split like that and began swatting things to see. As you rock back and forth on the bed hugging your knees, you have to hear the cat go through a list of everything he tried to split, from flowers to pillows to almonds to chicken bones to piles of dust, and it takes three hours to go over every last thing and you’re just so sick of this cat. Finally you yell through the door for him to please shut up. He’s quiet for a moment. And then he starts to cry. Big, loud, sobs. He says he never wanted to hurt anyone, and that all he wanted was a friend, and that he thought you were his friend but he can see he’s not wanted and that’s really sad. In fact, he spends about an hour talking about how sad that really is, repeating himself often. Eventually you feel bad and say you’re sorry you hurt his feelings and he perks up and starts a story about a bridge and you just kind of go 'uh-huh, uh-huh, right, uh-huh’ as he talks. He never, ever, ever stops.