"You're gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul" - I just love that line...

Apart from that, still feeling depressed. So many things I could be doing, but instead I can only sit here, feeling dead inside.

I'm tired of being made to feel like an outcast in life. I spent most of my existence so far trying to fit in somewhere, and it never worked. Whenever people complain they don't belong, people tell them that's just because they're different, or 'special' or whatever crap like that, and that they should be 'proud' of their difference. Yeah, that's one piece of useless advice when most of us are just regular people with nothing special or different about them... just bad luck meeting the wrong crowds all the time.

My only friend is my cat. Seriously, he's the only one, beside my mother, to show unconditional attachment and true loyalty to my person. Yet, as he acts more like a small dog around me, I wonder how different it would have been for him had he been free to roam the world. As I type this, there he is, sitting quietly on the bed, staring at me.

When I was little, I used to make 'pacts' with my pets because I hated reality so much that I wanted to die with them. I used to promise myself that as soon as my pets died, I'd kill myself. I started promising it with Johanna, the hamster I grew particularly attached to when I was 8. By the time she died a couple of years later, I had a black cat and so I easily found myself postponing my own death sentence, thinking I'd die when the cat died.

When I was 18 and lost my black cat, instead of killing myself as promised, I... I just carried on living.

I don't understand why I never wanted to grow up and live. These thoughts of wanting out have been with me for so long... Deep down, I was always a melancholic person, creating dramatic scenes inside my head endlessly.

I never understood why I lost the black cat. I still don't understand. When we moved countries overnight, we'd had to leave him behind because we had no idea where we were going. After our first three months in London, I started having nightmares of him being abused and starved. We'd left him with 'friends' until we could find a way to get him over to this forsaken island.

After that flurry of nightmares, I became convinced that the cat was being abused and about to die, so I convinced my mother to make a run for it - to just pick the cat up and smuggle him back on the island. She agreed.

When we returned, we sprung up on those 'friends' by surprise, and found that they'd been keeping the cat locked up inside a wardrobe. My once beautiful jet black cat with piercing green eyes was a shadow of his former self... skinny and terrified. They'd even broken one of his canines. As I opened the wardrobe, he first cowered further back inside, but as I called for him in whispers, he emerged slowly looking like... looking almost like a small child who couldn't believe his eyes.

We took him away with us and as we waited for a boat near Calais, reality suddenly dawned on my mother. She panicked, saying there was no way we'd be able to smuggle a cat across the border without people realising it. She said we had to leave him there, in the middle of nowhere in the night, promising that someone would surely find him and it would all end well.

I remember my 17 years old self sitting on the bench of some bus stop, pressing my cat harder against my chest as she spoke, heavy tears running down my face. No, no, no, I kept stuttering, looking around at the deep darkness of night... I could see my mother grow more panicked as she fought the urge to cry.

"If you leave him here, I'm staying with him... I'm not leaving him behind..." I kept weeping.

We remained there for a long time, in the cold of night, not knowing what to do, until suddenly a taxi stopped by. The man lowered the window and asked if he could be of any help, and my mother just told him exactly what the problem was. The man stepped out of his car, approached me as I clutched at my cat, and asked me if I had a bag. I nodded blankly, showing him my large, empty saddle bag.

"Just put the cat in there darling," he said matter-of-factly.

"What?" I gasped.

"Just put him in, look, let me show you," he insisted. And as he spoke, he grabbed my cat by the collar and shoved him inside the saddle bag. "There, you see, he's not moving. Cats stay quiet if you transport them in something dark. Just keep him in there and no one will know."

He was right, and we managed to smuggle him almost too easily. Of course this all happened pre-2001. A stranger in the night had helped us...

A mere year later, we lost the cat nonetheless. I was away to finish my studies, and my mother decided to let the cat out in the garden, which would have been fine if only the people who shared the house with her didn't start throwing stones at him for fun. That made him terrified of returning, because every time he tried, the people would scare him away with stones.

When I returned for a brief holiday and heard what had happened, I spent my days outside in that garden, waiting for him. Finally, he showed up, dirty and covered in wounds. I still remember the bleeding gash on the side of his head... I tried to approach him, but he wouldn't let me come close, yet I could see he still recognised me. The defiant look in his eyes... wild and suffering at the same time. At night, as I would retreat alone in the bedroom while mum was out working endless hours, I would watch him stand on the lower side of the house's roof, looking toward my window from a distance.

One night, I came out into the garden again. I knew it was my last chance to get him back because I was going away the next day, and wouldn't be back in months - and I knew we would have moved away again by then. It had just stopped raining and despite the cold darkness of night, there was a beautiful moon gleaming, giving us all the faint light we needed.

I saw him at once, sitting quietly on top of the high wall standing between the garden and that of the neighbours. I approached slowly, praying inside that he wouldn't run away, began to climb up on a pile of old stones and bricks to reach him... I reached out for him with one hand ever so slowly, letting him smell me first... he didn't move. I caught him by the collar and hugged him tight against my chest... but as I now held him, I couldn't go down without jumping, and as I jumped, he panicked and started to fight me off... and I had to let go.

I had to let go. And it was the last time I ever saw him.

It's been over 10 years now... I never dreamed of him again except for that one time, a couple of years after we lost him for good. That dream wasn't a nightmare this time. In that dream, I was back in our old home in Paris, which surprised me in the dream as I walked in, wondering how it was possible for me to be back 'home'. And as I wandered about, surprised to find everything still exactly as I remembered it, there he was. I gasped in surprised as he came to rub himself against my legs as if he'd never left. "You're home," I whispered, envying him.

And then I woke up, and it was the last ever time I dreamed of my old black cat.

My heart is too full of accumulated sadness, and I don't seem able to let go. I used to see a shrink, a few years back, and as she asked me to tell her about the things that affected me, I used to start giggling as I told her about these things. About the bad stuff in my life. At some point she asked me why I was always laughing whenever I was talking about sad things, and I shrugged. I hadn't realised. It was just an uncontrollable reaction, I said. I said I knew there were worse things happening to people out there, but she said others were irrelevant when it came to the pain experienced by a person.