It started with a cat named Nomi.
In the summer of 2006, I was twenty-two. My family had temporarily moved into my father's traditional medicine clinic in suburban Hangzhou — a quaint two-story wooden house on a cobblestone street, where summer mornings smelled of rain-warmed earth and breakfast vendors calling out from the street.
On the second morning, I walked back from the breakfast stalls, my arms full of pastries, and found a ball of orange-and-white fur rubbing against my father's trouser leg. The cat turned, looked at me, then at the bags of food in my arms, and — after what looked like a long moment of deliberation — bolted out the door.
He came back the next day. And the day after. Always at mealtime.
Without ceremony, my father began setting out a small bowl of rice mixed with fish broth for him. I teased my dad. "You're a grown man making friends with a stray cat over fish." My father didn't look up. He simply placed the bowl in the same spot, every day, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I named him Nomi.
For seventeen years, Nomi was there. He was there when I fell in love — and made his displeasure perfectly clear when my new boyfriend tried to take his usual spot. He was there when I got married, wearing a red bell collar my mother had tied around his neck, sitting with the quiet dignity of a family elder. He was there when my daughter was born, stationed beside the crib like a little sentinel — the quiet guardian, the cat uncle. He witnessed the version of me that no one else saw. The 2 a.m. version. The kitchen-dancing version. The version that sat in silence and needed nothing but a warm body beside me.
And then — as life gets busy, as responsibilities pile up, as days begin to fill faster than we can keep up — I stopped noticing him. I didn't stop loving him. I stopped seeing him.
One Wednesday evening in 2023, my mother called. He hadn't eaten or drunk water in two days. I drove to my mother's house and found him lying on his blanket — the one with the little yellow flowers — barely breathing. I knelt beside him and stroked his forehead. He opened his eyes, looked at me for a long moment, and quietly closed them.
At the cremation, I took a small pair of scissors and cut a tuft of his fur. I had it placed inside a memorial locket. I wear it every day.
"Nomi wasn't just a pet. He was the first companion in my life who loved me without asking for anything in return. In a world that constantly asked me to be more, do more, prove more — he asked for exactly one thing: me. Just as I was." — Yvonne, Founder of HerKin
For three years, I carried his memory — not as grief, but as love. The kind of love that doesn't disappear simply because the one who gave it is no longer beside you. And slowly, I understood: Love doesn't disappear. It changes form. It looks for somewhere new to land.
In 2026, at forty-two, I stopped running. I left the company I had worked at for years. And in the quiet that followed, I felt him again — not as a voice or a ghost, but in the memory of a paw on my cheek, the weight of a warm body on my chest, the sound of a purr in the dark.
HerKin is what came next.
