You are truly my friend if I could meow around you thoughtlessly.

At least that’s what I learned by befriending Levana.

For our undergraduate graduation, I made a bookmark of cats as my gift to her. Studying in ITB with a friend who loves cats meant that we easily bonded by interacting with our campus cats.

ITB is a home to many stray cats which are nurtured by a community called ITB Street Feeding. It’s a collective community including students and staffs of the institution, started to take care of the cats during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. What I appreciate from this community is that they actively conduct cat neutering and educate the public about it. In fact, for our numerical methods class, our team studied feral cats and overpopulation using a compartment model (Will probably be shared in other page or media)! We even had a chance to chat with one of the long-term volunteers of the community to collect data of the cats within our campus.

Anyway, clearly her bookmark is colored, whereas I mainly make monochromatic drawings. She was the one who colored the bookmark and added more meaning to it! (I love collaborative art so much!!)

The colored version gives representation of the cats we like and the named ones from our campus. I like siamese cats while she likes tuxedo cats. There’s a famous long-haired calico cat in ITB named Madam Eva. My neighbor in my family house owned a friendly tortoiseshell cat who greeted me each time I ran pass the house. There was one orange-white cat we met eversince it’s a kitten in our campus, named Tantan.

To close, we love cats so much and I hope we all can always find someone to share the same love to anything in life.