Two years. 

104 weeks.

731 days. 

That Linus has been gone.

Each day is further away from the last time I held him in my arms, wrapped in a towel and my pink sweater. I have to scroll back longer to get to pictures of him on my phone or hear his crackly voice in video.  My memories play on loop like an vinyl record with no end. An infinite slideshow projected in my mind of his dark, black pupils. There are mornings I open my eyes and forget he’s gone; expect him to be sleeping on my hair, paw across my forehead, fuzzy belly up towards the sky. Then I remember and it feels like turbulence on a plane when it suddenly drops hundreds of feet and your stomach plummets towards land, you’re clenching the arm rest, arduous breathing. It hits me that he’s not physically here with me; it still feels like falling and falling. 

The day he left, I whispered to him in his carrier: “I can let you go if you need to go, I can let you go.” I was lying, of course. I wasn’t ready, are you ever though? How do you say goodbye to your soul? 

to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go

(Mary Oliver) 

The breaks in my heart are mending slowly, a sort of spiritual kintsugi; cracks filled by love from friends and of Lucy. What once felt like an unendurable loss has tempered to a more manageable mourning. There hasn’t been one day where I don’t think about him and miss him. I’m doubtful that’ll ever change but why does it need to? Because he still exists as long as I’m around to remember him; in remembrance he’s with us, with me, with Lucy. 

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day time, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.

— Edna St Vincent Millay