text: When I moved to my college town, the first semester was already going on for about two weeks, and it was basically impossible to find a decent room, so in the beginning - for about six months - I lived in situations most people would describe as adventurous. It was interesting at first, but very fast was becoming a living nightmare. And after a search, that felt like years, I finally found a place: a whole house for three people, nice housemates, not far away from university and all vital necessities nearby. The house was something you would expect from a old Grimm tale, a maze-like M.C. Escher nightmare with, for some unknown reason, very weirdly arranged rooms on half-levels, staircases that either ended in a kitchen or at the neighbors house or somehow in the garden or in the attic. It also had very large holes in what we prayed weren’t load-bearing walls, especially the one, which was ground-level and connected the house to the also rundown garden, which was basically just broken concrete with small sick islands of gras. But the garden had a nice cabin, which we shared with our neighbors, who also had a worn-down-as-hell house. Anyways, it was very, very, very cheap, so it was perfect. There was only one catch: The place had a cat. And it wasn’t that one of my two new flatmates had a cat, no, the building came with it. One of the former residents brought her into the house and when he left town the cat was so used to her newly conquered habitat, that he thought it would be the most humane thing, to just leave her and go on with his life. Another tiny part of his decision to leave her behind, might have been, that she was also crazy as hell, as you will come to learn in this story. Anyways, I had never owned a cat, so I was never able to develop an affection for these animals, plus, they come with a certain reputation of being dicks. I also remembered, that I was mildly allergic to felines, with a light pink rash on the skin test. So the cat was a problem. But I really wanted and also needed to move in, so I did, what I had to do: I ignored the shit out of her. I wasn’t greeting her, I wasn’t petting or caressing her, always avoided eye-to-cateye contact and trying to only feed her when it was absolutely necessary. When my flatmates were gone for a longer time, I basically just dumped a whole bag of cat food on the kitchen floor and just avoided stumbling over it when I was cooking. The cat was also totally banned from my room. So she was in my life but not a part of it. We continued this relationship of peacefully ghosting each other for about five months. It was almost at the end of my second semester, where I started settling. I had my favorite courses, my favorite clubs and bars, my favorite restaurants and I also established a fair amount of necessary acquaintances and even made some good friends. My new place had a big attic, where we studied and played table-tennis, but basically just hung out and got drunk. Most of the time, it was me and Philip & Philip, same name, different people, equally lovable. And with good friends always come their friends, and those are the ones, you *don’t* choose but still need to accept in your life. And they brought Thomas, one of those friend-of-friends, you can’t avoid. He was a weird, somewhat ugly guy, but handsome in a way, very smart and what you would call the life of every party. Just one of those guys everyone loved. I hated him instantly. But after a good amount of beers, I started beginning to slightly approve of the presence of this blue-eyed intruder. And it was exactly this moment, when something magical happened: The cat-lady of the house decided to pay us a visit. As usual, she would sneak up on us, using the couch next to the stairwell as a strategic cover, only to appear out of nowhere to scare the shit out of us. For the Philips and me, this was a totally normal behavior, we had witnessed this for many times, but not for Thomas, who hadn’t been at my place before. His handsome smile suddenly turned into a hideous grimace. Screaming in horror, he jumped up the couch (as if that would help with a cat!) screeching and mumbling incoherent whispers of terrified dread. He grabbed his stuff and ran down the stairwell, like someone, who was saving his last possessions from a fire. The cat was following him downstairs, apparently excited to suddenly find such an entertaining and unexpected prey and we listened to his horrified screams until the door to the street finally closed with a loud bang. As it turned out, Thomas was afraid of cats, and I don’t mean a little, it was a full-blown phobia. For him, being in a situation like this, was basically like drowning in a sea of spiders. The cat came back to the attic, that was now filled with loud laughter and looked at me with eyes you could only describe as mischievous. I looked at her with a lack of understanding and with the pride of an emotionally distant father, who just discovered that his little girl can knockout the strongest guy in high school. We smirked at each other, knowing, this would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. She was called Mashura, named after a druggy 90’s happy-hardcore djane from Germany, a purple-haired, weird, life-is-a-party, techno queen; and that turned out to be a very fitting name. With black and brown colored fur and little yellow stripes, she was basically an eight pound wasp, but way more dangerous. Scalpel-like claws that would cut through metal, created to bring death to anything that moved but also, to gently massage your stomach for some reason. Eyes, that either warned you about the three seconds you have left to live, or stared into your soul with a fearless love. And with the affection of a loving friend, who only wants to cuddle and watch a movie with you, who, a few seconds later, transforms into an unpredictable, temperamental maniac, screaming "I’m not going to be IGNORED!!!“. I think it’s fair to say, if she would’ve been a human woman, I would have fallen for her in a matter of minutes. And from that infamous day on, I fought with my roomies to be the one, feeding, petting and caressing her, playing and cuddling with her, showing her my favorite movies and sharing my strawberry ice cream with her. I also was the one, who was rewarded with dead mice, with dead birds and one time, amazingly, with a fat dead rat, right there in front of my room next to Mashura, who meowed in pure joy. She wasn’t like a pet, more like a weird roommate and buddy who loved you, but still would mess with you on any occasion, basically like best friends would do. She was fully able of opening all kinds of doors: jumping on the handle, pushing it down with one paw, and using another paw to push away the door from the frame, creating a convenient slot for her to leave the room. Like any other cat, she also loved heights and was sitting on the shelves in the kitchen, silently watching you cooking, fully aware of the fact, that you haven’t noticed her yet, patiently waiting for the moment where you leave for one damn minute to wash your hands in the bathroom, just to come back and find her going down on your steak, which by now was dragged across the whole kitchen floor (as a student, I washed the steak with hot water and ate it in tasteless anger). And when she was sleeping next to me, I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, just to find her watching me like a hawk, or maybe a vulture, making me almost shit myself. But that one time, she really outdid herself. It was wintertime in our snowy linen lands and our old building had an abandoned ground floor with no foundation and, like I said, a lot of big holes in the back wall. Bad for keeping temperatures humane in winter, but perfect for a cats free-roaming spirit. Since my room was on the first half-floor, but was directly connected to the L-shaped slanted stairwell that led from the kitchen to the ground floor, the door had a knob instead of a handle, to keep the cat from opening it in the middle of the night, which in winter would have resulted in my certain death, caused by freezing. I was sitting in my room, studying for an upcoming exam. It was one of those courses, where you study and study like a maniac but still couldn’t wrap your head around the subject matter, so you feel stupid and worthless, and you start getting angry and furious, asking if humanities endless struggles and basically all of its existence are worth this trouble at all. Mashura was outside, scratching at my door, searching for some entertainment. I wouldn’t let her in, trying to concentrate on the unsolvable mysteries of Media Theories and focussing on not going berserk. After an hour, she started getting really mad, scratching furiously at the door and jumping on the knob, trying to open it again and again, meowing, and somehow growling, like it would be the most vital part of her life to get into this particular room. I turned up the volume of the music and ignored her as good as I could, drinking loads of cheap energy drinks to compensate for the four hours of sleep I had that night and continued learning. After another hour, I started to understand a little bit, finally breaking down some of the topics of the prep paper, getting deeper and deeper into the tunnel, starting to find a little light at the end of it, and then understanding many of the problems, setting up connections, that made sense, breaking and breaking them into smaller pieces. Finally, *finally* a redeeming epiphany! Andy Dufresne - who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. I was so happy, I couldn’t believe it! I also really, really needed to pee. So I hurried to my door to get to the toilet, only to realize, that I was locked in. I stood there in sheer wonder and disbelief and after a few seconds I figured out, what just happened: My keys were still on the outside of my door and my feline friend Mashuras relentless jumping and gripping and grabbing turned the key into the lock. Not much, just slightly enough to keep me from leaving my room. In this sudden realization of my entrapment I started shouting and screaming at the door, her, happily meowing at me, just happy to finally find some form of communication. Raging, with a bladder, that should have been emptied an hour before, I stood in the room and looked through it like a panicking animal, trying to find a container that felt appropriate to hold in approximately two liters of fermented, cheap dollar-store-red-bull, but there were no bottles or vases, or anything like that. In total desperation I started looking for grocery bags, but of course, I only had the ones out of paper, stupid environmentalism. I tried to call my flatmates multiple times. They didn’t answer and were probably out for the day, so I figured, there was only one way to pee. I rushed to one of the windows, which was about six feet above the sidewalk, jumped into the snow, only to realize that in the heat of the moment I forgot to put on any shoes, and ran to the little canal next to our house and relieved myself of a gallon of glowing-in-the- dark urine, trying not to moan like a pervert. I finished and rang my neighbors doorbell, who unfortunately were my friends and who opened the door with very confused faces, as they saw me standing there shoeless in my t-shirt at temperatures below zero. They let me in with a curious laugh and I avoided looking at them, only mumbling "Don’t ask...“ while I angrily walked through their kitchen to our garden to our backdoor into my house. There she was. Meowing. Purring. Rubbing her back on my legs. I turned the key and entered my room, freezing, changing my snow soaked socks, calling her things like "If Hitler had a cat.“, "God’s revenge for the sins of mankind.“ and "A pure catastrophe.“, fully aware of the beauty of this pun. She apologized to me by licking her ass in nonchalant indifference. Like I said: What best friends would do. Eighteen months and many beautifully weird stories passed by, and then she died. I came home one day and she was lying on the ground floor, meowing in a bad way, obviously in pain. My housemates and I drove her to the vet and we found out, that apparently someone in the neighborhood put out food that was poisoned, to kill the few rats that were roaming our backyard from time to time. And she just ate it. The vet handed us some medicine, told us to give it to her every hour and wished us good luck. My housemates and I came up with shifts, taking the now almost immobile cat, who just meowed in agony and peed herself, to our rooms and gave her the liquid medicine, that we had to apply to her throat, using a syringe, every time our alarm clocks hit the sixty minute mark. I had the last shift of her last 48 hours, that felt like weeks. The alarm went off and I put her back between my thighs, like a baby, starting to slowly feeding her the medicine while stroking her head. In clueless despair and total fear she would bite and shiver and cough, because medicine tastes bitter, and would look at me with wet eyes of hopelessness and agony and, this time, her lack of understanding. The coughing got stronger and stronger, the moaning stopped, and her head fell back between my knees, with open mouth and her tongue hanging out. I actually was able to take her back for a few seconds with mouth-to-nose ventilation, something I learned from a documentary on dogs, but her time was just up. We drove her back to the vet, who declared her dead and gave us two choices for what to do next. Either take her back and bury her in our backyard or, for the second choice, leave her there to be taking care of by something Germans call a "Tierkörperverwertungsstelle“, which roughly could be translated to "animal cadaver utilisation place“. Needles to say, we took her back to our house. My flatmates started to build a beautiful cross with her name. Also a fancy casket, made out of the shoebox she used to sleep in. We kept a head count of her killed prey on the fridge for years and glued it onto the casket, next to little pictures of birds and mice, of which we replaced their eyes with little X’s. I was in charge of digging the grave, which took me about three hours. German law says, that any dead animal needs to be buried seventy centimeters or around twenty-eight inches deep, to prevent scavengers like foxes from digging up your backyard, and after a third of the depth, it basically turns into what feels like shoveling concrete. In the evening, all of us were mentally and physically tired, hardly able to keep our eyes open but less able to close them, so we decided to invite our friends over to keep our minds occupied and to have a little barbecue and drink a few beers. We called them and told them our cat died, without sharing any details of the last two days, and an hour later about fifteen people showed up in our backyard, armed with basically every bottle of liqueur they could find in their sideboards. We started barbecuing and drinking and everyone literally had ten stories about Mashura to tell, one weirder and funnier than the other, leaving us crying in laughter for the rest of the night. One friend told us, she almost broke her neck slipping on the cats vomit, barely avoiding falling down the stairwell. I thought about strawberry-ice-cream-cat-puke and smiled. Another friend once crashed on our couch, because he passed out drunk, and in the morning almost had a heart attack, because when he woke up, Mashura was staring at him, an inch away from his face. Also, basically everyone at some point was holding her up, like you would with a newborn lion, loudly chanting a fake-african-jibberish-song, long before we knew, that cultural appropriation was a bad thing. And of course, everyone was tearing up with pure joy, listening to the story of that one time Mashura made Thomas run down the staircase, fearing for his life. They stayed for a while longer and after a few hours, everyone left, taking a beer for the way and a little bit of the pain. And that was it. A few month ago, many years after her funeral, I saw Thomas again. We are friends now, because sometimes people change, of which I mean myself, and we had a really nice chat, catching up after a long time. But there were these small moments during our conversation, tiny little things he said, that still annoyed me, and where I thought: "Man, I wish I had my cat with me right now!“ and I could just take her out of my bag, hold her in front of his face, just to see him screaming and running away, high-fiving her afterwards and smirking together at this stupid idiot! But then I remembered, that I was still the one, who once got locked out of his own room by the same cat. So...