Content Disclaimer: grief, pet loss, brief mentions of self harm. This is just a long form story about the unexpected, traumatic loss of my soul cat.
The first day you left was in retrospect the easiest day.
There is no room left for introspection when it is loud — so loud — and there are voices coming from five different directions — and each minute feels like an hour — and — … There are just layers upon layers upon layers of noise and not a single syllable can be lost, every single word must be responded to, and like a faint drumbeat there is a tick, tock. Tick tock. Time only moves mercilessly forward.
That day is like a hot iron brand pressed into the mind. There is no forgetting that day, not even if someone wanted to. It is the sort of memory that rears its ugly head in the depths of the night, when there is no one else around to stifle them, and with it the flood of emotions that had been suppressed that day because god, there had been so much happening and it didn’t feel real and
there it is again. That hopeless, futile wish for that day to have been literally any other kind of day. Anything but this, the sight of a crash cart the moment the door opened and the doctor looked inside the carrier and saw you, gone. The five pairs of hands working frantically even though it was inevitable that the moment you entered the car and were whisked away, that you would never be coming back home until you arrived in a polished, wooden urn.
Tests. So many tests. Money and time thrown, begging, pleading for there to be something that could be cured. Each ambiguous result, each quiet voice with those sad eyes, one less reason that could be used to pretend that this would all be okay, that you would wake up, that you would recognize the one who loved you the most as trembling hands stroked your soft fur where you liked it.
Each minute passing as slowly more and more hands leave to attend to the other people in the emergency room, and the last, desperate wish to just be able to say goodbye hears no answers and is thrown to the wayside to dissolve not nothing.
The words finally run out and the silence feels heavier than the noise. Louder, somehow. But if hands pressed against ears, nothing would change, because silence cannot be muted — only filled — but with what? With a limp, unmoving form that would not and would never respond again?
There were constants in life. Things that didn’t change, and so could be relied upon. Even when nothing else would stay the same, the world is full of things that remain. The sun rises and sets. An object dropped falls to the ground. The night sky is full of stars. And you are the most brilliant star of them all.
The sun’s warmth sustains all life. You always find your way back to the one who loved you most. The ocean is blue.
In deep space, stars and planets orbit each other. Your purr is the hum of the universe. Space time warps with gravity.
These are the things that never change.
But you are not here anymore. Here, where the sun is supposed to rise each morning and set each night, where the night sky is supposed to be full of stars, where the clouds bring rain and the sun brings warmth, where the entire universe is a sprawling web of galaxies and stars, you will never find your way back to the one who loved you most.
There is nothing that can be done. You are gone. You were gone the moment you were found with your broken, unresponsive body. The only anchor left is that you don’t know anything. You felt no pain. One moment you were here, probably sleeping, and the next moment you…
Just a fleeting, torn shred of regret that you would never wake up again to hear the things that hadn’t been said to you yet.
That was the easiest day.
You were the anchor. Affixed to everything was you. You held everything together, even when the together wanted nothing more than to fall apart into the void. Without even a moment to say goodbye, the threads were slashed and now there is nothing but the sense of falling, disoriented. Tumbling past knives that slash through flesh, cleaving and cutting away at all the pieces of you that had been kept tightly.
There is anger. How predictable. Indulge too long, and the thoughts spiral. Predictably. This is so unfair. Only five years together. There was supposed to still be time left. It plays out like a tired, cliche sort of story, and it feels pathetic but it turns out humans really are just that and the white hot rage careens and writhes because there is no one to be angry at, there is nothing to blame, there is nothing…
The birds fly with their feathered wings. The fish swim with their scaled tails. And you were supposed to still be here.
The anger at the injustice — except there is no injustice. It just is, life just is, but thinking it over and over again only hurts worse. The mind so desperately wants to find a pattern, or a purpose, or meaning, to this meaningless, arbitrary trauma, but to look up at the stars and ask is to receive nothing. Cut it out. It is a waste of energy. It won’t change anything. Nothing can change anything. But still the anger drives forward, disoriented and directionless. Just looking for something. Anything.
Then the anger festers and begins to turn into guilt. Searching for answers only makes it worse. Because there is no reason for life to be straightforward or explain itself. It just happened, because it did, is the only fact and it is wholly inadequate to cling to. So the anger that needs meaning begins to look for signs that were missed. What if a little bit more attention had been paid? What if you had someone else with better eyes and ears to love you more than anyone else? Then perhaps you wouldn’t have been failed.
It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts and you would never have wanted to cause sadness and hurt and you would have wanted to be the comforting, grounding anchor that you always were but you aren’t here and it hurts.
A bargain. Anything, if you could come back. Any cost, if it would have saved you. But you were beyond saving. Nothing can change what happened. What was is.
Knives, plunging down between the shoulder blades, gouging crimson lines downwards as they leave behind two bloody gashes. As if there were wings once, and they were forcibly extracted. You were those wings. The agony burns. And then it is punctuated with torturous agony that makes throwing this pathetic, stupid life away seem worth the exchange of relief from the hurting. Or perhaps it would be only appropriate to make visible these wounds that nobody can see. The image of smooth, clean skin criss crossed with bloody red lines catches and lingers.
It had been years since the last relapse, this cannot cycle now. Digging fingernails into the palms to try and keep it under control.
It is the new normal, an undercurrent of stabbing pain that never leaves, not even during those insomniac nights, when sleep is fleeting. The days are meaningless and the hollow you left behind feels sharp and bitter. It is the kind of hollow that the body will try to curve around to cover, but instead it just feels ever more empty. There ceases to be a reason to sleep because there ceases to be a reason to think about tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. When the mind is not preoccupied with the stabbing pain of that hollowness, thoughts of how wonderful it would be to sleep and never wake again are the only pleasant thoughts that exist.
There are things in the world that do not change. The sun rises and sets. The night sky is full of stars. You are gone because the one who loved you failed you. The cosmos dances around itself.
The memories of you count time and the only thought of the future is of a time where more time will have passed between now and when you left, than the time that you were here. Now you only exist inside of these shattered thoughts, and there will come a day where even that can no longer be put back together and then will you have ever existed at all?
Or maybe it would be better to forget, forget everything about you, forget that you were loved and loved in a way that can never love again, forget the feeling of your warmth, forget the sound of your voice, forget the stars in your eyes, forget the way you were found, forget the way you were let go, forget forget forget. Then maybe the emptiness that causes even more pain than the knives ever could would cease to exist and could be filled with meaninglessness and that which shouldn’t have changed but did could never have existed at all.
The pain is suffocating. Like drowning.
It is a waste of resources to be angry, so the anger is shoved away. Life is unfair, deal with it, so the injustice is brushed under the rug. But the guilt gnaws away.
Lost in the abyss that is the anger, the hurt, the guilt — consumed by the infernal rage that every morning must be registered to memory without you — your stars in your eyes.
The eyes that can never be looked upon again. The eyes that never opened, not once, not ever.
But they were — are — beautiful, brilliant, and bright. They contained the entire world that was you and your love and everything else that made you the one who will never exist again. The blue crystalline hues, as if the entire sky could be contained within them, and with it the entirety of the universe as it rotated slowly. And they did, they did, they were — are — the indisputable proof of the bond that was — is — shared. They are brighter than a thousand suns. They sparkle and dance and inside of them is all of the love that the world has ever had.
When did those memories of your eyes become so dim?
The anger, the hurt, the guilt.
You were — are — beautiful, brilliant, and bright. The memories left of you deserve to be bright. The memories of you as you, the memories that are funny and soft and sweet and obnoxious and stupid. Your love ought to be crystallized, so that it will never erode or tarnish. When your memory passes by like a breeze, the whisper of air ought to be crisp and cool. Your visage should steal the breath away, because that is how beautiful you are. You were — are — loyal and warm and soft and annoying in a way that you showed nobody else. Even with hands that can no longer hold you, the low vibrations of your purr radiate through muscle and bone, and it is a sound that sounds like the galaxy turning.
The anger, the hurt, the guilt. They are felt intensely. It is not the kind of guilt that could be convinced by facts, no matter how many alternate timelines are spun, no matter who is doing the spinning, no matter their clinical experience or not. It is a stubborn, self-destructive guilt that exists only because there is no meaning to what happened but there has to be meaning, the mind cannot rest without seeing a pattern, and the only pattern that exists is that you were failed. It is the kind of guilt that casts a blackened haze over those sacred memories. To think upon those memories is to think about the guilt, and to think about the guilt is to open another wound upon the body.
To think upon those memories is to hold you like you never left. To think upon those memories is to see the stars uninterrupted as they slowly spin above the earth. To think upon those memories is to cut flesh open.
Your soft warmth wraps around those wounds.
Perhaps there is no way to ever debate that poisonous, polluting guilt. There is nothing that could ever be said, even if it was logical, rational, factual, that could convince an illogical, irrational conclusion that exists in the space where a lack of meaning is like nails on a chalkboard. No, there was nothing that could be done to persuade that which was not persuaded. After all, it had simply appeared, creating its own meaning where there was none, trying to make sense of life as it was and why things couldn’t be that way anymore.
But there was one other truth that remained constant. You would have never wanted it this way. Drowning in the narrative that something could have prevented this and deciding that it was only right that the suffocation be completed as punishment. You, who loved in a way that will never exist again, simply purr gently against the heart and your low hum is all of the life that has ever lived.
The guilt will be burned. The toxins that bleed dripping cracks into those memories of you will be cleansed.
And left remaining — you, the brilliant, bright guiding light. You, everything.
There are signs of you everywhere. You did not cover your tracks when you left. Somehow, even the deepest tracks that gouge canyons across the heart are the most precious. There is a whisker in the bed you always slept in. There is your scent in the blankets. There is your fur from when you had to be brushed and you didn’t like it. When the kitten looks for company, your protege envelopes them into their bodies, and you are there as they echo your sweetness and your protection. You would have loved this. You might not have liked that. You are nowhere but you are everywhere. Right at the moment that you could be taken and held in the palm of a hand, you dissipate and flit elsewhere.
Time stops for no one. The day you left was the easiest of them all.
The nights are heavy and cold and sleep does not come, because the thought of continuing into tomorrow and leaving you further and further behind is blasphemous and violates the things that should have never changed. One day, there will come a time when you have been gone longer than you were here. One day, that time you burned bright like the brightest star will become nothing more than a flash, and then like the brightest stars at the early hums of the universe, you will have blazed and then died and stars like you never could form again.
You are so bright. You are dazzling. You are warm. You are perfect. You are everything that could have been, and you were.
Some days, there are fleeting reasons to be less angry about waking up again. Some days, the morning arrives and it doesn’t feel as wrong as it once did.
If I try, I can reach to you from the abyss and you are the most beautiful soul to have ever entered my orbit, and the only reason it hurts so much is because you loved like nobody else can or will ever love again and caught by you I could not help but to let the heart of you replace parts of mine. Now these fragmented pieces of you are the most precious things and even though they are like shards of glass, cutting into me, sometimes they are soft and for one fleeting moment, I wonder if someday your heart will replace mine and I will become as bright and warm as you are.
