A tragic little story and a lesson

I feel so sad. Our newly-adopted kitten, Neko, has been missing since this morning. Gani woke up to find Neko gone and the door of our laundry area ominously open. Apparently, we forgot to lock it after arriving home from an exhausting day at the SONA rally. While we were sound asleep, Neko must have ventured outside and slipped while navigating the window. The steep drop below runs up to several storeys, perhaps low enough for a kitten to survive the fall. Or perhaps not.

We tried searching for Neko downstairs, but didn't find anything, not even a tiny paw print. Neko has such a tiny, croaky, pipsqueak meow that it would have been impossible to hear him even from a few meters away. He has been with us for only two days, not long enough to find his way back to our place. And there's no way to protect him from all sorts of imaginable predators: rats, stray dogs, kids, rain, and wheels.

I remember Neko's last night with us: he was snuggling up on the sofa and nuzzling his head on our chins. He kept clambering up onto my lap while I was typing, a pesky, papansin ginger tabby kitty who would tirelessly scamper after our feet whenever we walked across the room, thinking that they were toys.

Now I just want to mope around, sob my heart out, and wallow in bitter misery until the weekend sets in. But putting things into perspective can be sobering in a mortifying sort of way: all around activists are being abducted and killed by this wretched government, and here I am, lamenting over a missing cat. As much as I'd like to shed earnest tears for our lost Neko, I realize that dissecting this event at length runs the risk of bordering on the absurd, something conceptually similar to this story posted in gmanews.tv: Dog given to Shaina as Valentine's gift is dead.