◢◤ ELYTJE◢◤
So the world can feel the weight of a loss too great to bear
The world is moving, they say.
But I am not in the world.
I am in the space between breaths,
a hollow carved by sixteen years of love,
now left uninhabited.
I reach for you and find only shadows.
I call your name into the darkness,
and the darkness answers back with silence.
Every room holds your absence.
Every corner whispers it.
Even the air seems to grieve with me.
I think of the mornings I woke to find you there,
softly purring, paw stretched across my chest,
tiny eyes full of trust and wonder.
And now…
the mornings are just mornings.
The sun rises, but it does not touch me.
It does not carry warmth.
It only illuminates the emptiness where you used to be.
I have tried to live.
To eat, to work, to breathe.
But each act is hollow,
because you are not in it.
The world continues like nothing happened,
but everything happened.
I lost everything the moment you left.
I cry in ways that cannot be seen.
I scream in ways that cannot be heard.
I whisper to your ghost,
and sometimes I feel the faintest brush of fur,
but it is only a cruel trick of memory.
I lie awake at 3 AM,
the hour you always chose to remind me you existed,
and I wonder if I will ever stop feeling this.
If the weight of your absence will ever lift.
If I will ever breathe again without remembering
that you are gone forever.
There is no comfort.
There is no peace.
There is only a void that echoes your name,
that holds the ghost of sixteen years of perfect love,
and that stretches endlessly,
because the heart cannot unlearn you.
I would give anything to hear your purr again.
To see your eyes, wide and trusting.
To feel your tiny paw on my chest one last time.
But there is nothing.
And there will be nothing
until the stars themselves crumble
and the universe forgets my name.
Elytje…
I am broken.
I am hollow.
I am yours, still, in every atom of memory,
even though you are gone.