It's Still Life

A Cat Named Thessaly

She came because she chose to.
A small black defiance of gravity,
fur electric with purpose,
already naming herself into their hearts.

They say grief is a flickering.
A light that won’t decide,
the house breathing differently
in the spaces she used to fill.

He held her at the end.
Let that land.
He held her while the asthma
took her quick and wrong,
a small body
against the terrible ordinariness of air.

And after—
the lights began their morse code,
blinking she’s here,
she’s here,
she’s gone.
Every loss he’d buried rose up.
All of them flickering
through a lightbulb.

But animals leave clean.
They do not haunt —
they visit.
They pause in the doorway of your grief
to show you where the wound is,
then step back
so you can see it clearly.

Tell her you love her.
Tell her her time here is finished.
Watch the lights steady themselves
into ordinary brightness again.

Eventually.
That’s the word.
Eventually the air becomes just air again.
Eventually you stop checking the corners
for a flicker of black fur.

Eventually you understand:
she didn’t leave you.
She just finished
what she came to do.

For my eldest son’s cat, Thessaly, who died last week.