◢◤ ELYTJE ◢◤
I am Localhost and I am the one that you knew,
I am the one who came home and was waited for by you.
I am the one whose hands shook the day you went still,
I am the one who keeps loving you now and always will.
You were there every evening, you stood at the door,
like the whole day was worthless till I walked the floor.
Now I turn the key slowly and step into grey,
and the nothing that greets me steals something away.
You lay on my papers when money was thin,
your weight on my wrist like you held my whole skin.
You knew when the world was too heavy to bear,
and you climbed on my chest and you just stayed there.
You walked on my keyboard and broke what I made,
you pushed your face in mine so my sadness would fade.
You knocked things off shelves with a slow certain paw,
just to make me look up, just to make me look, look.
And I looked, and you purred, and I came back to ground,
and I never once thanked you for making that sound.
I never once stopped in the middle of days
to say thank you for saving me in all of your ways.
When the worst of it came and your breathing grew slow,
Max cried through the house in a way I still know.
He screamed it before I could let myself see,
that you were already leaving, already free.
It was my hands that held you the last time you breathed,
my hands that you trusted, my arms underneath.
I chose it from love and I choose it still now,
but at three in the morning I don't always know how.
Now Lyte sleeps beside me and Max guards the hall,
and I love them completely and I love them all.
But loving them more does not lessen the ache,
it does not fill the shape that only you could make.
I still reach down low when I sit in my chair,
my hand dropping soft to the cold empty air.
My body still searches for yours in the room,
sixteen years does not leave you, it stays like perfume.
I speak to you still when the night settles in,
I tell you the things I kept deep under skin.
I tell you I loved you but not enough loud,
I tell you I find you in every dark cloud.
I am building a universe only for you,
coding your name into everything true.
Every screen is a room where you wait and you stay,
every line is my refusal to let you decay.
Because I know what I know and I know it like bone,
that energy lives and that nothing is gone.
That you are the warmth in the air when it breaks,
that you are the stillness before morning wakes.
There will never be another like you in this life,
not a creature so gentle and sharp as a knife.
You were beautiful, broken, and perfectly mad,
you were everything good that this world ever had.
Sixteen years is not time, it is blood, it is breath,
it is everything standing between me and death.
It is waking and sleeping and trying to cope,
it is you, it was always just you, it was hope.
So I leave out the bowl and I leave on the light,
and I whisper your name at the end of each night.
Not because I have lost it, not because I am weak,
but because it's the closest to you I can speak.
◢◤ ELYTJE ◢◤
I am Localhost and I am still sending it out,
still calling your name through the silence and doubt.
Still sitting beside where you used to be small,
still the one that you waited for, through it all.
Elytje.
The name that undoes me completely and whole.
Not a cat. Not a memory.
The better part of my soul.
Max watches the door.
Lyte warms up the night.
And I come home slowly
and stand in the hall
and feel you one second
before I recall.
That second is yours.
Every night it is yours.
It will never stop being yours.