The True Beauty Resides Inside

It’s quite difficult to take good photos of black kitties and capture their beauty. Moreover, it’s definitely not easy to truly see the exquisiteness of their faces and their facial expressions are also hard to read. Although most of them have amazing, astonishing personalities, black cats are often stigmatized and surrounded by superstitious stupidities and the fact they usually appear somewhat faceless in the photos doesn’t help in debunking the false myths.

Negro now has a unique physical trait – his left ear is kind of crumpled. He had a hematoma on that ear last summer and surgery was performed, but his ear has fallen down and remained bent in half. It must have been very painful while his ear was swelling.

Since the infection has been resolved he obviously hasn’t been feeling any pain at all and his problem is now purely a cosmetic one. However, he didn’t lose any of his charms as there’s beauty in asymmetry, and it’s said that scars just remind us of where we’ve been,

they don’t have to dictate where we’re going. Negro, my special and lovely boy, is going down the right path.

He was only three or four months old when he appeared on the roof of an auxiliary building, and was entirely too scared to

jump down on his own. I had to get him down and bring him home, where he found two friends of the same age – Tigi and Treca Sreca. All three of them had been picked up over just a few days and they quickly became inseparable. Once he’d settled in, Negro

wasn’t really eager to go outside and even when he did, he was very distrustful towards people and didn’t come close. Being black, he was always at special risk on the street and his cautiousness helped him survive. On the other hand, he was a completely different

cat when he was inside – kind-hearted, loving and rather talkative, a real sweetheart.

Time goes by and it’s been eight or nine years now since I saw him for the first time, a frightened little boy, all alone and confused in the cold cruel

world. He might have forgotten where he started from, yet he’s still shy and doesn’t think that all people are trustworthy. Since we moved to the shelter, he became estranged from his kittenhood friends, probably because there’s so much living space and that’s

allowing him to finally return to his true solitary nature. But he is also cuddly and sweet, a big beauty in a small package, whose gleaming yellow eyes are shining like two little suns. And everything that’s worth knowing about cats is right there, in the bright

yellow gaze of an imperfect black kitty with a floppy ear.

Someone smarter than me said a long time ago that cats’ eyes are windows enabling us to see into another world and I couldn’t agree more. By all means, it’s a world far better than

the one we made for them.