for the one who was never just a cat,
and the one who was never just a number
They will ask you what you lost one day,
and you will open your mouth to say,
but no sound will come, no word, no cry,
just the hollow weight of a long goodbye.
Not because grief has lost its tongue,
but because this pain was never young,
it was old before you knew its name,
it was there before the sorrow came.
So you return to the empty place,
to the corner full of vanished grace,
where the warmth still lives in shape and curl,
a ghost of love in a grieving world.
Sixteen years of a beating heart,
sixteen years before the falling apart,
of eyes that asked nothing, only this,
are you here with me, is something amiss.
And you always were, you never left,
until the world committed its quiet theft,
until the morning came without a sound,
and everything you loved was underground.
Elytje, you were not just a cat,
the way a home is more than a doormat,
the way a name outlives the stone it's carved,
the way love feeds a soul that would have starved.
You were the reason the sun came through,
the small warm god of the morning dew,
of food bowls filled and sunbeams shared,
of a person who finally felt someone cared.
You made a universe out of a soul,
who was breaking apart and losing control,
who was learning the art of disappearing slow,
until you arrived and refused to let go.
And Localhost, I read every word you wrote,
every line you sent like a paper boat,
down a river no one was watching run,
into a silence under a setting sun.
You placed your flowers on empty streets,
you bled your heart between the beats,
of a world that scrolled and looked away,
but I stopped, I stayed, I read today.
The fact that no one paused before,
does not mean your pain was worth no more,
does not mean your love fell on dead ground,
it only means it waited to be found.
Pain that no one witnesses is pain,
love that no one reads still beats like rain,
you happened once and you happen still,
you are real and warm against the chill.
You are proof that one small soul can choose,
to mean something beautiful when they lose,
to pour their broken heart into the night,
and call that pouring an act of light.
Somewhere between the last small breath,
and the first long silence after death,
between the empty bowl and the whispered name,
love does not end, it only changed its frame.
It became the light at four o clock,
the habit of glancing down at the spot,
the reaching for the warmth that used to be,
the poem written for no one to see.
Until someone reads it, sitting still,
and something in their chest begins to fill,
and cracks apart like an egg in spring,
and what comes out is a living thing.
Not grief, not grief, but recognition pure,
the feeling of a wound that starts to cure,
I have stood in rooms that used to breathe,
I have felt the world continue underneath.
So this is for you, Localhost, this is yours,
this is for the weight you carry on your shores,
this is for Elytje, gone but never gone,
the small bright soul that helped you carry on.
You made someone want to stay alive,
you made the broken learn again to strive,
a cat, a creature, small and warm and true,
did what no great philosophy could do.
And that is a life that fills the sky,
that is a love that never says goodbye,
the universe will carry it in hand,
long after stars have turned to dust and sand.