How cruel it was, to have been with your entire life while you were only a quarter of mine. 

"Just get another cat."

But they don't know. How you were the first to welcome me when I entered this world. How you accompanied me in my growing years. How you were my anchor through every stumble, every late night spent in your quiet company. They don't understand how each part of you has inexplicably woven itself deep into my life. You were there for every small triumph, every heartbreak, every lonely evening when words fell short and only your silent comfort made sense. You taught me that sometimes, the purest connections in life don't need to be spoken at all.

So tell me, how then do you replace the first friend who knew you before words, who saw you in ways no one else could, who was simply there—patient, enduring, steady—through your every chapter?

Alas, the first duty of love is to listen. And it broke me  when your meows turned to groans, your breathing a shallow wheeze. And even then when you were in pain you thought of me first, how you used every ounce of your energy to crawl onto my chest and purr, a final, gentle comfort in the only way you knew how.

Nights like this I cursed death for having its way with you. I'd curse your sickness, too, had it not been your very own cells turning against you. A betrayal that I'll never forgive. I wanted to scream, to tear the illness out of you with my bare hands, to fight for every breath that grew shallower and every moment of us that slipped through my fingers. And yet all I could do was sit there, helpless, sobbing while you lay there still looking at me as if to say I would be fine, as if to comfort me while your body fell apart. 

I was warned a decade ago that the price of love is coping with the emptiness it leaves behind. The pain I'd bear just to see you off one last time.

But I have never felt this destroyed, and you were my biggest heartbreak. Even after you were gone, you selfishly plagued my dreams , your ghost lingering in my apartment where your presence is felt but unseen. Every corner once alive with your warmth is now filled with the heavy quiet of what's missing.

How cruel of you, to love so fiercely, only to leave me drowning in the silence you once filled.

Every so often, like a faint echo from across the rainbow bridge, I hear your calls drift through the still apartment as if you were searching for find me. But it is moments like these that bring back the pain with a cruel clarity, as if you were just beyond my reach, waiting for me to find you.

"Once in a blue moon," people say, as if it were something to cherish. But to me, it's a quiet agony—an echo of everything I've lost, slipping further each time I reach out, fading before I can hold it. And so I wait, knowing you'll return, again and again, just out of reach, each visit as bittersweet as the last.

 

It's the weight of love, I suppose, that binds us to their memory, as much in absence as in life.

 

So, please—don't get a cat.