when i was a kid, my sister had animal crossing wild world for her ds. you could create four playable characters, so she made me one so i could play on her ds sometimes. when i eventually got my own ds, and when she'd started to outgrow the game, she'd let me borrow the game cartridge as long as i promised to take care of her town. there was this villager, a black cat named kiki, who lived next to a stream near the town hall. there are different villager types and some of them are rude as hell or just annoying. kiki was a "normal" villager, though, so she was sweet and perfect and even maternal. she became one of my favorite villagers. i'd spend a lot of time running around the town looking for her. whenever it was too early or too late, the villagers would sleep in their house, so i'd sometimes fast-forward the time in the game settings just so i could talk to her. there were also in-game events. one of the events was a green-thumb thing, where whoever had the most flowers on their property would win. obviously the goal should have been to decorate your own house, and i would, but i remember i'd steal flowers from the yards of other villagers and re-plant them in kiki's so that she would win instead. i loved her very very dearly.

i spent a while trying to figure out how to segway into this part or word it without it feeling too heavy but i'm not sure how, so quite frankly, i had an abusive childhood omg. i was so young that i didn't even know what the word cruelty meant, just that i was surrounded by it. i remember i'd sometimes hide under my blanket whenever i felt particularly scared or just overwhelmed. i'd make the suffocating feeling worse by trapping myself with the heat from my DS that i always tucked beneath my pillow before bedtime. there was this one time (out of many) that i played animal crossing as a distraction. another thing about animal crossing is that when you build up enough of a relationship with a villager, they'll give you a framed picture of themselves with a quote on the back as a token of friendship. so, i was playing the game with tears in my eyes when kiki excitedly approached me and told me she had a gift: her picture frame. i placed it in my character's room so i could read the quote, which just said "hang in there, kiddo." it was the simplest thing ever but it meant the world to me in a way i didn't really fully comprehend. i'd be trapped in the Torture Chamber of Hell and just try to think, "maybe i will be okay because the angel kitty on my screen told me to just hang in there." even when i grew into my teens, i'd occasionally think of her and her quote when things got too heavy.

as i type this all out, i'm realizing it's dramatic to hold a small interaction from a fictional black cat in such high reverence, but every now and then i still think of kind kiki. for so long she was my hope...
kiki i love you so so so much and i am going to hang in there forever