And She said: “Let’s have a Cat”

I'm house sharing with an English girl, Leoni, she's the owner of the house and we've been living together since July. We’ve met in the same building but we work in different companies. Two months after we met, she invited me to share a house with her. I am a very particular person when it comes to living together, as everyone knows, I like everything organized and cleaned my way, giving special importance to my privacy. At first I thought it would be easy to share a house with a stranger, what I never imagined is that this stranger could be even more private than I am, but here she was to throw all my certainties to the ground. On the third day of living in the same house we discovered that we share a birthday as well, a curious and totally unexpected fact. As she is older than me, I soon began to realize that the personality traits that made us similar, in her, perhaps due to her age, would make it harder. The months that followed were not easy, Leoni is not much of a fan of food and started suggesting that I do not cook at home since the smell bothered her, asking me not to enter the common spaces if she is there because she wanted to be alone, even saying that the fact that we are living together would not mean being friends. I started spending most of my time alone at home, dining alone, spending most of my time locked in my room, i could spend weeks without seeing her except at work. Curiously at work Leoni was the most sociable person i knew, always surrounded by people and smiling. As time went past, what at first seemed like a nightmare began to become comfortable to me. I went out alone, spent most of my time with myself, and spending a lot of time away from home, until the day I received the following message from her at 4:00 AM: “Where are you? It's too late to be outside . I'm worried. Stay safe.” Over time I began to realize that the changes did not just happen to me, but Leoni also began to try and be more present, to share her life with me, acting in a completely opposite manner than me. This week she asked me if we could adopt a cat, I found that question weird because I know that she has never liked animals and is especially afraid of cats. I agreed, but it did not stop me from asking her why the sudden change. Her response made me curious: “I want to have a cat because I dont want to feel alone every time you go on holiday." My coexistence with Leoni has improved, always respecting each others space, we will see what changes this cat will bring to us, but i realized, most of the time, the person you was before couldn’t come back once some changes happen within you, being the change in you for better or worst, but you never gonna be the same.