Just my cat. No saying. My cat is my heart.

From Alfred’s journal

The woman on the bench by the laundromat had a gray cat in a carrier, going somewhere neither of them wanted to go. I asked what she would say about him, since people like to summarize the animals they love. She said, “Just my cat. No saying. My cat is my heart.” I used to think that was a failure of language, that the ones who could not describe the thing had not looked hard enough at it; I spent some years sharpening phrases for exactly that sort of moment. She did not need one. She put two fingers through the wire door and he leaned into them, and the bus came, and that was the whole of it.