◢◤ ELYTJE◢◤ For everyone to feel the weight of losing a soul too precious to replace. The house has become a mausoleum of memory. Every corner remembers you. Every shadow trembles with the echo of your presence. Even the air tastes different like it’s holding its breath, waiting for you to appear. I reach for you in the night. The sheets are cold. The pillow is empty. My hand closes over nothing, and the silence laughs at me. Not cruelly just indifferently, like the universe itself is reminding me you are gone. I walk past the places you loved: the windowsill, the couch, the tiny corner where you hid during storms. I pause, expecting to see you, to hear the faintest purr, the softest pawstep. But there is nothing. Nothing but my own heartbeat, thumping like a hammer against a hollow chest. I dream of you sometimes. Not happy dreams they’ve stopped. Now they are filled with loss. I see you, small and warm, then the light fades, and I wake to discover I’m still alone. People tell me time heals. They don’t know what that means. Time stretches. It weighs on me. It does not heal. It only reminds me that every day I spend without you is another day I must endure this absence. I cry in places where no one can see. Because the world would not understand. It was “just a cat,” they say. Just. As if sixteen years of love, trust, laughter, and warmth could ever be reduced to “just.” I touch your blanket. I smell it. It smells faintly of you, faintly of memory, and I hold it to my face, wishing I could hold you instead. But you are gone. I am here. And the world continues. The bills, the noise, the sunrise all of it moves on as if nothing matters. But everything matters. Because you mattered. Because losing you has emptied me of more than words can hold. And so I sit in the dark, listening to the silence you left behind, and I understand: I will never stop missing you. I will never stop loving you. And some nights, I am not sure I will ever survive this.