Dust in the Moonlight

If I could talk, what would I say to you?

I’d say thank you. I’d say thank you, because you gave me a life again. You took me from the cold and the wet, and you fed me, warmed me – loved me. You held me during fireworks, and stroked me in the warm sunlight on mornings before school. You were a world to me.

And I was a world to you. I walked joy into your life, tiptoeing, tripping, trailing, slipping, in fur and memories, warm prints on the bed, paw prints on your thoughts. Young, I bounded around you, enriched you with play. Middle-aged, I cuddled and curled, soft in the crook of your arms. Old, I slept, safeguarded, warm, tired, and more deeply loved than ever.

If I could talk, what would I say to you?

I would say to be sad, but to remember that I am all around you. I am in the dust of your mind, slinking through the sand of thoughts, a shadow, an echo, gone and ever-present. Faded, but burned eternally into you. I am in your pillows, in your sleep, in your breath. Behind your eyelids, deep in your fingerprints, thrumming in your blood. More eternal than life ever made me, death remakes.

I will blur and soften, but never leave.

If I could talk, what would I say to you?

I’d say be happy, because we had each other. Be glad of the pain, because it is just joy washed a different colour. All the intensity remains, all the love, just in a new shape.

I am happy that I had you. I am happy that as I lie here, breathing just a little more on the edge of the world, you are with me. Your hand rests on me, where it belongs. Your tears are sharp and clean, and I would take them away if I could, but not tonight. Tonight, they will fall.

You are full of sorrow, so full it overflows, so full my fur is wet and my ears tingle with the dampness, and your sorrow fills me too, because I lose you just as you lose me.

If I could talk, what would I say to you?

If? But I can. I talk with my body and my eyes, with the press of my head, with the quiver of my ears, the closing of my eyes. I talk of trust and love, of things deeper than words, in a language between us, which no other can speak. I talk in your heart, in a place that goes beyond – beyond death, beyond life, beyond living, beyond being. A hollow made of love, that burrowed and twisted and carved out room for feeling in the neutrality of life.

I need no words to speak to you. I need no words to tell you. You are mine and I am yours, and there is no power in the world to part us. Our bonds are deep, my dust is your dust, your weeping is my weeping, and we see the moon together when the lights go out.

And perhaps, in dying, I can speak after all. I tell you that I am not leaving, that nothing ever truly leaves this world, that we simply reshape and reform and breathe new life into the dust that came before us. I can tell you that it’s okay, and you will carry on, through the depths and heights.

When you are ready, come and look for me beneath that silver moon. Leave behind the dust that holds you, as I leave behind my own – to become another, to rebuild a life that somebody else will love – and come to rest somewhere beyond the quietness where there is no day and no night.

If I could talk, what would I say to you?

Only this: love outlasts death, on both sides of the bridge, and when sleep comes for you, I will be by Her side to welcome you as you welcomed me. In my parting, you learn this, and I have spoken without words.