Twenty minutes lost. I twist my left wrist to check the time. The scene has cut, seamlessly, from my bedside to a cozy corner of a restaurant. Sitting across from me is a young woman, her hands holding mine over the table.

"Sorry, but do I know you?" I lift my eyes and meet her affectionate gaze.

"Not well enough." She gives my hand a gentle squeeze and smiles.

Back then in a foggy and gloomy February, after the news broke that Russia had invaded Ukraine, my girlfriend K, who had been with me since university for eight years, glued her eyes almost twenty-four hours a day for an entire week. Apart from the noises she made while making instant noodles (no one could say for sure if those counted as human speech), she did not make any other sound. Perhaps those sounds were directed at our dark blue British Shorthair, the cat at home. Her eyes back then really did look like a cat's: pupils huge and black, so deep you could not tell what she was thinking.

A week after I came back from a bar on Knutsford Terrace in Tsim Sha Tsui called "Cat Hair," she disappeared, and the cat disappeared too. All that was left was a sunflower, like a magic wand.

At this moment, the girl sitting barely thirty centimeters from me now gives me the same uncanny feeling as K did back then. Of course, she is not my girlfriend, who vanished without leaving any message. Actually, K may have flown to Kyiv. Eight years ago, I met her at a peaceful demonstration in support of Ukrainian protesters, on a chilly Monday night of January, where there was only a handful of university students voicing out "THEY CAN'T KILL US ALL." Over in Kyiv's square, though, fires burned in the snow. That was the strange setting in which we met. Not long after, we left our families and moved together into a tiny flat in Sham Shui Po, where we kept a dark blue British Shorthair. She was a cat-girl.

I have no idea when the girl across from me sat down here, or when she started drinking a Negroni, my favorite cocktail. But she is exactly my type: a cool, intellectual face, smiling at me with a certain seduction, studying me in silence. Judging by her clothes and appearance, she appears to be about twenty.

"Did you need something from me? Why won't you say anything?" I ask.

"Don't you like me quiet?" she says.

I freeze for a moment. She seems to know what type I like, what drink I love.

"Why would you say that?" I ask. She leans in another five centimeters closer.

"Didn't you just tell me twenty minutes ago?" she says.

"Where?" I have no idea what she is talking about.

"In your bed," she says.

I do not know how to respond. I keep trying to recall, but nothing comes back. I glanced at the watch on my left wrist, the one K gave me, but the memory didn't return. I am not drunk, not blacked out. I am sober. Everything is OK.

The background music at "Cat Hair" just now was The Beatles' new song, "Now and Then," a track resurrected from John Lennon's unfinished recordings using AI technology, arranged by the still-living legend Paul McCartney. No one could have imagined John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaborating again, more than half a century later, in such a surprising way.

"I know your bed very well," she says. "Including that snowy Hong Kong scene you're obsessed with. You still don't remember me?"

A snowy Hong Kong was something that came to me often in dreams. There are plenty of people saying they have had the same dream online, but no one knows what it is supposed to mean. I once painted that snowing Hong Kong. K loved the painting and had it turned into bed sheets. The British Shorthair loved pacing back and forth on that bed, and she slept between us every night. K would often say that cat-girl was like a little witch from a Japanese cartoon, who could use magic. When she first came to our home, she was along with a sunflower. K often said that sunflower was the cat-girl's magic wand.

As time went on, it felt as if K loved that British Shorthair more than she loved me. The cat-girl had become the third party between us. Every now and then, when she looked at me, there was something sly in her eyes.

On a cloudy, melancholy evening in February, K went to Kyoto for a week's trip, and I slept alone in the bed. The British Shorthair, as usual, was pacing on our bed. Just as she fell asleep, an awful thought came to me: while K was away, I would take the cat up the hill behind our building and let her get lost there.

I quickly stuffed her into the carrier bag and slipped out of the building in the middle of the night, even the security guard noticing nothing. I left no trace that could lead K back to what I was doing. The hill behind our place is only about the height of a thirty-storey building, but that night, carrying her up, it felt like walking a mountain trail for an entire day.

I decided to leave her on the top.

When I reached the top, I opened the bag. In the darkness of the night, all I could see was a motionless black shape. She was quiet, very very quiet. I walked away. When I turned back, I saw only two glowing eyes.

The moment I left, regret began to gnaw at me. I twisted my left wrist. After about twenty minutes, I went back up the hill to look for her. She was nowhere to be found. Only the carrier bag remained. When I got home, I was already mourning her. Then I found her sleeping on the bed.

I never told K about that night. It became a secret that existed only between the cat and me in this world.

In the "Cat Hair," the girl in front of me now takes out a sunflower, gently sipping her Negroni. Her pupils are pitch black and enormous. With a hint of mischief in her eyes, she waves her sunflower and says, "You still don't remember? Right now, this world has only you and me left."