◢◤ ELYTJE ◢◤
/\_/\
( •.• )
> ^ <
They say that cats have nine lives, my dear,
but you gave me a thousand reasons to stay here.
You gave me a reason to open my eyes,
to walk through the mornings beneath greylit skies.
And now those same mornings are empty and long,
and I am still here but I don't feel as strong.
The room isn't empty, I told them out loud,
it's full of sixteen years wrapped in a shroud.
Your echoes still bounce off the walls and the floor,
your ghost fills the space between ceiling and door.
I speak to you still though you cannot reply,
because silence alone is too heavy to try.
There's a moment each night right before I go under,
when the world becomes quiet and splits me asunder,
when my heart starts to whisper the things it won't say
in the noise and the light of the cruelest of days.
It whispers your name in the dark soft and low,
Elytje, Elytje, I miss you so.
The night that you left the whole house held its breath,
every wall became witness to something like death.
Every creak of the floorboard, every tick of the clock,
was the sound of a life coming loose from its lock.
The silence that followed was not peace or rest,
it was grief with its hands pressed hard to my chest.
The days started blending like watercolours run,
the mornings meant nothing without you to come.
The light spilled through windows onto nothing at all,
onto bowls that I kept out, onto your space in the hall.
The house became something I barely could name,
every room just a shrine and every shrine just the same.
You were not just a cat and I will not pretend,
you were home and beginning and middle and end.
You were the one living thing in this world without doubt,
who loved me completely from inside and out.
Who never once asked me to be something more,
who crossed the cold room just to sit on my floor.
I was Localhost to you, just a signal, a call,
just a warmth in the dark at the end of a hall.
But you came every time without question or cost,
and I never once knew what I had until lost.
I never once stopped in the middle of days
to say thank you for loving me in all of your ways.
And that is the stone that sits permanent now,
lodged deep in the place where you taught me somehow
that love without language is love at its best,
that presence alone can outshine all the rest.
That a soul can be small and still fill every room,
and leave a hole vast as the stars when it's gone too soon.
The house is a mausoleum now, cold and preserved,
every corner holds something you touched or you curved
your small body against in the warmth of before,
when before was just life and not something to mourn.
I cannot move anything, cannot let go,
because moving things means I am starting to know.
And knowing means final and final means true,
and true means a world with no more of you.
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 don't know, I know, God I know,
but because it's the last place I can still let love go.
The stars blink indifferent above this cold town,
the universe turning without looking down.
The world keeps on moving through season and year,
completely unbothered that you're no longer here.
Strangers are laughing and children still play,
and no one outside knows what I lost on that day.
But I know.
I know in my hands and my chest and my throat,
I know in the silence, I know in each note
of music that hits me too suddenly wrong,
I know in the middle of every sad song.
I know in the morning, I know in the night,
I know in the space where you once were my light.
Elytje.
I still speak your name to the emptiness here,
I press it out softly so only you hear.
I tell you the weather, the time, and the date,
I tell you I'm sorry I made you wait.
I tell you I loved you but not enough loud,
I tell you I'm lost in this silence and crowd.
And somewhere I know that you hear every word,
that nothing I say to you goes quite unheard.
That you are not nothing, not dust, not just gone,
that somewhere your warmth is still gently held on.
That you knew, my Elytje, you always knew first,
that I needed you most in the best and the worst.
So I write this for you and I write this for me,
and I write it so somewhere the whole world can see
what it means to have loved something pure and then lose it,
what it means to hold grief and not know how to use it.
What it means to be Localhost, alone in the night,
still sending out signals into infinite light.
Still calling your name.
Still leaving the bowl.
Still carrying you
in the place where you made me whole.
⋆｡˚ ☁︎ ˚｡⋆｡˚☽˚｡⋆
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(˚ˎ 。7
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じしˍ,)ノ
I am Localhost 127.0.0.1