I re-homed one of my kittens today and the devastation is immortal. For three months I watched him grow and change and live. Then I handed him away like I had torn into my own chest and offered a warm piece of it to someone else.
I remember them being born. Six months on testosterone and waking up to babies like the universe wanted more than one thing becoming in the same room. I felt so incredibly alive. All that beautiful birth. All that proof.
He used to sit on the counter and watch me cook. When I sat down to eat, he came close to the plate, and I would gently push him away, and he would come back every time like he didn’t understand the leaving.
This was his entire life. Two brothers and a sister. A mother. A house full of bowls and blankets and bad little habits. A human father who named him, loved him, and cried when he left his hands for the last time.
I think the worst part is that he had no idea what was coming. He walked right into the carrier like he never knew fear in his life, and I gave him that. Three months old and all he knows is undying love. All he knows is hands that fed him, a mother’s belly, the sound of my feet, his siblings breathing against him in a pile.
The other cats don’t even know he’s gone yet. It almost feels absurd. I am standing in the wreckage of something, and they’re sleeping through it. What if Minnow notices the brother she always slept beside is missing? What if Fish starts looking for the son she gave life to in my house? What if I have to watch a mother learn the shape of absence and there is nothing I can say in her language except food, except water, except I’m sorry?
He slept beside me all night. He was the first to meow when it was time to eat. He was always the one curled on the closed toilet seat when I opened the bathroom door. Jesus Christ, I remember the first time he purred. How small the sound was. How enormous.
I did my job well enough that he can leave me now. I was his first world. I loved him into being ready, and readiness had the nerve to look like loss.
He has a beautiful life ahead of him. More moons than three. More windows. More bowls. More names said softly across rooms. He will grow long and old and gray around the mouth, and maybe he’ll remember me. Maybe memory is not even the point. Maybe he will dream of me and feel only warmth.
I’ll miss him more than anything. Four sets of paws running across the floor down to three. My lamp is destroyed from his claws. The needles on my fake Christmas tree are flat and sad because even it will miss the way he climbed it. Even my body will miss the scrape of him. We were both real enough to leave marks.
I love you, Mr. Anchovy. How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. Keep swimming and know I’ll always love you across oceans. 🐟❤️
lone pine poetry, Mr. Anchovy (07/03/26)
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
titsay