◢◤ ELYTJE◢◤ for anyone who has ever lost the one who made life feel real The nights stretch longer now. The stars blink, indifferent, and the moon climbs the sky without asking if I am still alive inside. I reach for you. Not your fur. Not your warmth. I reach for the sound of your breath, the small rhythm that once said, “I am here. You are not alone.” And my hands close around nothing. Nothing but emptiness. Nothing but the faint echo of a heartbeat that belonged to you, now gone forever. The world keeps moving. People laugh. People talk. People live. And I walk past them, a ghost carrying a name they will never understand: Elytje. Everywhere I look, I see reminders. The corner where you slept. The blanket you claimed. The sunbeam you chased. Every memory is a knife turned gently in my chest. And I am bleeding quietly into a life that has lost its warmth. I cry without sound. I scream without noise. Because the world would not understand. No one could. No one could understand a love that was sixteen years deep. Sometimes I imagine you in another place, but it feels like betrayal to even imagine it. I want you here. Here. With me. On this couch. In this room. In my arms. And yet, you are not. Never again. And the realization strikes me in waves. Cold, endless, merciless. That life will never be the same. I am left with shadows of you, a thousand echoes, and a hollow in my chest that no sun, no time, no love can ever fill. I will survive, they say. But I do not feel alive. I am merely breathing in the space where you once existed. And that space… is all I have left of sixteen years of perfection.