You never truly know what you have, until you have it no more.

Honestly, I thought maybe if I just give it some time it’ll go away like every other wound. It might not even be a memory I thought, it would become a blurry image at the back of my head which my brain’s secondary memory would eventually get rid of [ like all those happy childhood memories which now I so desperately seek ]. “It’s not that big a deal, people get over it quite swiftly,” I told myself, “you will too”.

unfortunately, I’m not. why?

he’s a cat. Just a pet cat. It’s fine. Why are my emotions blocking my thought process?

What am I thinking?

The lump in my throat, the lack of strength in my bones, the unclear thoughts, the inability of defining logic, memories striking my eyes like bolts of lighting aiming for grounds…

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5 Months ago 

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They were like couple o’ weeks old when our domestic helper [ my first time using that ] dropped them at our place. Their mommy cat was assassinated by some dogs and they had no safe-house for laying low. They were actually pretty good at laying low, for a day no one could find them inside our house because they constantly kept sneaking under everything.

The next day, I remember, the black one kept staring from the right side of my bed and when I smiled and scratched his head with my thumb, he cautiously climbed up my lap and just fell asleep. That was the first I called him “Blacky” [ yes, coz he had black patches, coz my creativity hitting rock bottoms ] and the other one was muddy so “Dusty” [ again, rock bottoms ]. It was nice, I wasn’t excited, but I was calm, I was less alone now. 

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I was holding Blacky’s tiny head on my four-fingers as he lied on the floor struggling for a good breath. That morning, he accidentally ran into some stray dogs and was brutally attacked. We managed to bring him back but the damage was intractable. The vet said he might survive and that’s what I wanted to hear. Everything was normal until evening passed and he couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what could be done, I was trying to think but I just couldn’t stop looking at him and hoping he could speak my language and tell me what he wanted. Suddenly I felt like my mom hit me with a flat wooden plate in the back of my head when she said: “he’s dying”.

That didn’t make sense to me he was fine few minutes ago. I rose my blanked eyes towards my elder brother, whom I have never found shredding a single tear for over a decade, quietly sobbing. Every struggled breath Blacky managed to pull in was a needle piercing through my throat. I felt paralyzed, like a part of me stopped…being.

“It’s just a cat man, it’ll be fine give it some time” my imaginary friend tried to man me up. I wanted that to be true, desperately.

.     .     .

A week has passed by and my imaginary friend was wrong. The small empty spaces I find everywhere are still empty. Every memory is still fresh as a sunrise.

The trouble they cause is no news for cat owners or the ones who had one. Having a kitten is like a demo version of having a baby. They are needy, they are messy, the only reason you don’t kill them is that they are cute and gullible, they don’t understand what you mean but they do exactly what you DON’t mean. [ Some may find this analogy far-fetched but that’s coz you never had a cat period ]

I know this is not the first time you are reading someone writing about their lost pet. The reason for me letting this out is quite relatable actually. It was world mental health day just a few weeks before all this happened. And I figured I couldn’t just ignore the fact that I was hurt, I was unfocused and a bit angry because I kept saying it wasn’t a big deal or thought that everyone else would find it foolish and an overreaction. I wasted a week thinking if I should write all this and I didn’t write at all. I was mentally sick of it.

With every sentence that I structure, I feel a bit pain, pain that kinda makes me smile, in his memory.

So, the most overly used and ‘easily predictable after two paragraphs’ moral of this story, Share.

NO matter how small or big a deal, Share.

[WARNING: now approaching a poorly crafted funny quote to reduce the emotional factor towards the end]

Sharing not only keeps your mind healthy. It also helps you have a lot of content for your future blogs.

— A selfish blogger

take care 🙂