Until Wherever You Are, My Little One

I dreamt that I woke and you were in my arms again. I fed you the crunchy treats you adored and watched you roam the premises with that grumpy, faintly offended air of yours, as though the morning had begun without your permission. Nothing about the dream was extraordinary, and that was what made it cruel. It was an ordinary morning, and I didn’t recognise it as a gift.

You were always a master of disappearing. You sought out the corners of the house no one else could reach. You kept a quiet vigil over us, over Toff. You loved us from a distance of your own choosing.

I never mistook that for indifference. It was devotion, spoken in your own language.

I never understood how much of my life was measured in you until the cup stopped overflowing. The frantic scuffle of your paws whenever an uninvited stranger crossed our threshold. The leap from the shed the moment my car rounded the corner, before I had even parked. You were tucked away in your own private world outside, getting up only when Mom or I stepped out with the trash, to brush against our legs and, on rare and generous occasions, allow a caress. Those were your rituals. I never truly noticed them. I simply lived inside them. Now the car rounds the corner, and the shed stays still.

I sit under the amber light of my office, attempting to write a letter to you.

Once, past one in the morning, I remember I was having a breakup on call. I paced the dark outside so no one at home would hear my voice tremble. You followed me through the cold, back and forth. You didn’t try to mend anything. You didn’t climb into my lap. You simply walked where I walked. You never consoled me. You kept me company. I have since learned that the two are not the same, and the second is what I love to experience through grief. I don’t want a shoulder to cry on , more so a companion who understands my silence.

Every morning, Toff came to you for a kiss. Every morning, weary of everyone wanting a piece of you, you fled. And still she returned. From you, she learned a kind of tenderness that doesn’t wait to be returned.

You were happiest around Mom, because she asked nothing of you. She let you be. I think that was the greatest tribute you could pay anyone, allowing them to sit at the edge of the world you had built for yourself.

People may look at the way I grieve you and not grasp how deep it runs. Life and death, they’ll say. Yin and yang. The natural order of things. They aren’t wrong. It just offers no comfort.

What they cannot see is everything you left behind. Nethmi and I grew close in conversations, and you were an indirect reason for that. Our mothers had lived in the same neighbourhood for fourteen years as near-strangers. Then, because of you, they began meeting, trading stories and food, entrusting you and your children to one another, bound by a kind of care that probably made sense to no one else.

You didn’t merely live in two homes. You stitched them together. Small lives don’t do that. Yours was never small.

You lived on your own terms. You weathered things in your own way. You never wished to be a burden. And right up to your final breath, you tried to leave without letting us witness your struggle.

That is the part I cannot set down. Not that you left, but that you tried to spare us. That even at the very end, you went searching for one last corner we couldn’t see into. But Callisto, we would have carried you the whole way.

I hope you’re with Chutti and Ilio now. I hope it is warm and gentle. I hope it is full of hidden corners, and that you get to be gloriously grumpy in every one of them and be loved all the same.

And here, in the life you have left behind, I promise we will care for Toff and Atlas. We will cherish their little peculiarities, listen for the things they ask of us without words, and try never to take the ordinary privilege of their presence for granted. That is the cruellest and kindest truth about losing someone we love. They leave, and in leaving, they give us an entirely new understanding of what it means to love.

For now, I will hold on to the dream. The weight of you in my arms, the rustle of the treats, the way you moved through the world as though every corner of it belonged to you. It did.

Until wherever you are, my little one.