Not long after our “life-saving” encounter, I discovered to my embarrassment that Theo actually lived on my street. It was a street of fifteen houses that straddled, on one side, a large park and, on the other, a sea of nondescript houses. I lived in house number 15 and Theo in 13, which made us close neighbours. Yet, although Theo had been living in that house for a while, and I had seen him many a time, I simply, for a better word, had “ignored” him. However, then he was “just another cat”; now he was Theo.
Theo and I met often. Our meetings initially happened in my garden. There, Theo would typically first tiptoe on the fence and pretend to examine something or the other, and then, almost without me even realising it, I would find him sitting next to me on the garden bench.
Theo later explained that it was important for such meetings to take place without attracting much attention, as that was the nature of cats: “We cats do things quietly, unlike dogs, who do the opposite, making a comical show of everything.”
Over time, we graduated to meeting in other places, including on my sofa, in the streets, in parks, and even in distant lands.
It was easy to be discreet when communicating with Theo, as it happened silently. An imperfect way to describe how I communicated with Theo is to compare it with the internal voice one hears when reading a book. When Theo “said” something to me, the words did not come out of his mouth; instead, I just “heard” his voice in my head. Similarly, when I wanted to say something to Theo, I just “thought it,” and he understood what I meant. After I got more and more “accepted” into the world of cats, I was able to converse with other cats as well. Soon it was natural as speaking with other human beings, or perhaps even better!.