Kissa

A little video of her

The first time you jumped into my lap, you were three months old and fit in the palm of my hand. You dug your tiny claws into the fabric of my shirt, and in a metaphorical sense — but also in a literal, undeniable, and irreducible-to-abstraction sense — you never left.

Because what you were had been there from the very first instant, whole, preassembled, with no room for unexpected developments or shifts in character over time. You hissed at anyone who tried to pry me from you or you from me (the distinction, purely rhetorical), and your grumpiness — the only truly authentic kind, one that didn't dissipate even when you purred — was a structural constant, a fundamental given of your composition.

And somehow, in a way that defies classification, we worked. Instant symbiosis. As if I had been assigned, by some unnamed force, to contemplate those enormous, unfathomable orange eyes with which you looked and decided. And you decided — for reasons that were never fully revealed to me — that I was the only person whose existence was worthy of recognition. No one else mattered. In fact, they were nuisances.

You were small, but the vastness of your presence was overwhelming. Your understanding of me was telepathic. You healed me from the worst afflictions of the soul with a purr, a headbutt, or a slow, deliberate blink. We were always enough for each other, and it was always the greatest nightmare of your tiny universe when another person was introduced into your life. You had decided, from the very beginning, that our equation had room for only two variables.

Over time, you learned that your love didn't have to be only for me, but until the very end, it remained essentially for me. While the vet said, "She doesn't want to go," "She wasn't supposed to hold on this long," I knew that what was keeping you there, defying biological logic, wasn't an instinct for survival but an instinct for duty. Because you had given yourself a mission: to take care of me.

And you did. For half my life. And though it was you who was small, it was I who was carried. Until that last day, that last visit, when you, already exhausted, still tried to stand when you saw me. And I had to say what I never thought I would have to say, had to give the permission I never wanted to give, had to reassure you that it was okay, that your mission was complete, that I could never have had a better companion. And I saw — I swear I saw — your eyes close in that exact rhythm, that calculated blink, and for the first time, I knew that you had understood and accepted.

Today, you left my lap for the last time, when I laid you in the earth, in the hole I dug at the foot of a Black Acacia. The weight that left my arms cannot be measured in your emaciated 1.6kg alone. It was the weight of all the 19 years you spent by my side. Half my life. The best half of it.

Rest now, my love.