This flower will live only a few days, Platero, but its memory will be eternal. Her living will be like a day of your spring, like a spring of my life.

( Juan Ramon Jimenez)

His gaze was distant but still intense. I felt that he communicated his farewell to me, through the windows of his eyes, in a very profound way. The assistant veterinarian brought him wrapped in a cloth. They were going to do an emergency intervention and asked me if I wanted to see him before the anesthesia. I peeked into his feline face, all wrapped up, as when one looks at a newborn baby. He looked at me with feline inside and, without knowing, we made a sacred commitment to see each other again, as we both had an ancestral memory of having met before.

Two months after this, I was looking back through the back window of an ambulance, lying on a small, narrow stretcher, on a three-hour journey to the hospital where I would undergo, on an emergency basis, very complicated heart surgery.

On the rear window of the ambulance, contrasting with the rapid landscapes of the sunset, like seen from a moving train window, I saw projected like consecutive films, memories of my whole life.

Come kitty, come... That's how I called for the first time, that little furry white and orange bubble, and he came up to me running with mischievous feline eyes. It was a young form of ancient life. I found him in the garden in front of my house jumping, climbing trees, chasing freedom in everything else, with a mania for living. He approached me and allowed himself to be carried. He was very restless; we gave him food, and he stayed to live with the family.

He was with us for maybe nine years. In the morning, he left early and returned to eat several times during the day, and in the evening, he would come in to sleep. We named him Kitty, and he was always a kitten. In the ambulance, I remembered that he had left us that day at the vet about two months ago and did not return at sunset. And I sighed.

The ambulance continued its trajectory, and the intermingled scenes of life continued to be projected on the rear window. All paraded in images and mind, family, loves, friends, colleagues – the present and the already gone. The past life was summed up in a parade of intermingled reveries; the present was an ambulance ride, and the future very, very uncertain.

Curiously, at that time, I did not remember enemies; they would not show up, and although there were memories of intense encounters and disagreements, these did not leave a mark, only scenes of having lived them. The moments of love and beauty stood out with a certain melancholy, and the moments of passion and adventure lost their excitement in memory and were only reflected in the shared affection and wonder.

The film continued to jump on the makeshift screen of the ambulance's rear window. The scenes were mixed without any particular sequence, in time, space or importance to me. Now I was in Beijing in 2009, the first time I was in China. I went for three days of work, and on the last day, a Sunday, I managed to go and see the famous Forbidden City. The taxi left me there in the middle of, I don't know, maybe a million Chinese, who spent their Sunday there, speaking to each other in a language incomprehensible to me.

That day I could feel humanity, not in the philosophical sense, but in its species, in the multiplicity, in the torrents of life manifested in so many human forms, and I was astonished to see so many passing by, with unknown stories, with their fears, anxieties and secret loves.

They were like ants in a garden anthill. And I felt again that “I”, discovered in my childhood, alone, surrounded by a sea of other selves, with whom I could not communicate and who, moreover, did not know that “I” was me.

On a new stretch of the road, the projected film again changed, and now I was remembering when for a school project, I had to interview Don Juan Ramón Jiménez, who lived in the neighborhood of my school and had just received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I remember having read his book Platero and I for my interview with him. I was fascinated by this image in the book about Platero, the donkey: "When we returned at night from the field when the sky was clear and starry, the stars were reflected in Platero's bucket of water, and it seemed that he drank water with stars!" I imagined the stars sliding down Platero's throat while shining and illuminating him inside. Somehow, that magic stayed in me. Later in life, in moments of anguish, I remembered it. During intense times of confusion in my youth, I wrote a few lines in a kind of diary that I kept: "Sometimes one needs to have a drink of stars to cure the pain of the heart. Yes, sometimes you have to take a few stars to ease the pain of waiting." I was a child of twelve or thirteen years, and Don Juan Ramón Jiménez a renowned magician of words. I remembered his smile when he welcomed my classmate and me, introduced us to his wife, gave us some cookies and a soda, and read us a few pages of Platero and me.

Remembering the magic of Platero, I thought about Kitty. I remember that, in the mornings, I would go to work in my office in the backyard of the house, and he would chase birds and squirrels, and after a couple of hours, he would stand outside the door and meow. I was listening to music and typing on the computer and would let him in. Then he would jump and settle on the table where the computer was, and look at me, with Platero's magic.

We conversed. I told him what I was writing; He looked at me with feline intensity.

One day I told him that I was writing a letter to my grandchildren, who were worried and disappointed because a certain Mr. Trump had won the elections in the United States, and they were frustrated because this was a crude guy with retrograde ideas of the world, of life, of the equality of human beings and so on. And besides," I said to Kitty, "he doesn't like cats or dogs. He looked at me and yawned.

Kitty liked classical music. He stretched like a cat and rested his white, orange-spotted head on his paws and looked at me from a state of advanced yogic relaxation. Inviting me to think about the life that was trapped in his stuffed bubble and the life that was trapped within me.

My mind would wander then from what I was writing and changed the subject to write about the vibration he transmitted to me, about the magic of life, the throat of Platero full of stars, his cat gaze of galaxy and universe contained in yellow-green eyes. I thought of the verticality of trees, the smoothness of their bark, their hunger for light, the erratic butterflies and birds singing in a symphony (hearing the latter, Kitty raised his ears on alert and his eyes were all attention).

I would write about life; life, boiling in every possible form, unrestrainable. That was the conversation that Kitty and I had on those mornings when he came to listen to classical music with me.

I would tell him about Meher Baba and how my life had been inspired by his message of love and silence, about meeting his disciples in India. Tell him that Meher Baba said that life was one existence and that we were all one. Kitty would look at me from his feline inside as if he knew as if we both knew. But there was nothing to know; it was communication beyond knowing, feeling, thinking or imagining. It was the very magic of life, the stars in Platero's throat; it was Being, which extended continuously between that orange-white stuffed animal and this human being.

At last, the ambulance arrived at its destination. It was the end of October 2018. I had surgery twice. Everything lasted a total of fifteen hours, and I almost went to those invisible fields where Kitty had gone a couple of months before, where the magic that lives in forms and stars is born.

An anesthesiologist (I think) woke me up. He was talking to me through a tunnel, or so I saw it and asked for my date of birth and my name, which I answered correctly. Then he asked me, who is the current president of the United States? and I said, "Oh no, my God," and he and his partner laughed and said, yes, he's conscious indeed.

And here I am now, 5 years after that awakening, sitting in front of the computer, writing. I distinctly remember Kitty lying next to me in total relaxation, looking at me deeply from time to time, from his inner-feline eyes and his furry shape. And so vivid is the memory that I talked to him now as if he was still there; Kitty, in case you're interested, Mr. Trump lost the election, and my grandchildren are happy, and the new president likes animals (although I don't know if cats). Then I said: I always look for you in the morning when I arrive at my office, and I decided to write this for you:

You arrived, a furry little ball in white and orange with intense amber eyes and a desire to explore everywhere. You would sit at my desk, listening to classical music every day, and you accompanied me, writing my thoughts and poetry. We played hide and seek, and you ambushed me; we had arguments about your feline hunts, which I considered a blunder, and you a cat feat accomplished. One day you hid and became invisible. And now I only have your memory and the love and secrets shared in those magic worlds of Platero.