'O micillo

'O micillo, the kitten. In Naples cats are everywhere — on scooters, in courtyards, on church steps — and nobody really owns them: they stay with you as long as they feel like it. Three took from them everything they are: instinct that can’t be explained, independence without meanness, and just enough mystery to make you say, “Who knows where it goes when it disappears.” In dreams, three shows up when something moves on its own. A hunch that arrived before the reasoning did, an instant liking or dislike, a choice made without being able to say why that later turned out to be right. It’s the number of the part of you that understands things ahead of time and doesn’t give you its reasons. The images that lead here are the cat and the kitten, and the difference between them is no small thing. The kitten is instinct that’s still clumsy, the kind that misjudges the jump. The cat is the same instinct once it has learned where to put its paws. In your dream it matters which one you saw, because they tell two different moments of the same thing. Three doesn’t ask you to follow your instinct blindly, or to silence it either. It only says that in your dream there was something that knew before you did. Whether to listen to it or put it to the test is your call: the Smorfia sets the number next to the image and stops there, like the cat on the windowsill.