Dear dead kitten,
I watched you die.
You little thing, a few weeks old, I watched you squirm, blood bubbling from your mouth. I am artless in understanding the emotions of a cat but I tried to in your case. I would've tried anything at all but I knew it was hopeless. I had started mourning you, even before you died. You kept those eyes open all the way through and when you died, you did not bother to close them and let it seem that you had drifted off to sleep. Nobody closed those eyes and you were buried as such, with clods resting against your tiny cornea. I think you must have become blind the second you were stepped on. I like to believe that in that instant you were transformed from a creature capable of feeling and thinking into a blind machine acting out the final sequence of death. The world that contained both you and me was a very shortlived one. And for me, it shrank to those few seconds when you were squirming on the tiled floor of our kitchen, little paws clawing the air, little muscles spasming; trying express the essence of life in some way before time ran out. Your pain must've been extraordinary. I stumbled off a treadmill this afternoon, my left middle toe dragging along the moving conveyor belt for a second. It has since blossomed into a welt, red and incessantly talking to me in the language of pain. And yet, when all is reckoned, it is just a few thousand cells protesting the death of their neighbours. I cannot imagine what it might have been like for you, to have most of your body rendered non-functional in about half a second's time. Time, time is what was missing from our relationship. I couldn't get to know you, or call you by a name. I hadn't stroked your fur enough or looked into your eyes enough,. before they were struggling, blood oozing up into your mouth. It was an accident, of course! You were wee small, a tiny moving fur ball on the floor and my father, a lumbering narcoleptic giant did not see you. He stepped on you once, crushing bones, pulverizing organs, undoing in seconds what your mother's womb had done in months. I saw him bend down with guilt on his fifty five year old face. He was sorry for taking your life away. And in me, you had an honest mourner. I, half his age, already far older than you would ever have lived to be, cried in earnest for you. I cried long and hard for you. My tears were hot and blinding, I blinked at my father through them, flung accusatory words at him even though I knew it was an accident. I wanted to fight for you a little because you were made to give up so quickly. All of the life that was charted out for you, all of the fights and fucks that you would've gotten into were just blinked into non existence. You struggled for a few minutes, blindly. I saw your red blood creep on the dark brown tiles near the refrigerator. My father tried to give you some water, he let a few drops trickle from his hands into your mouth where the red blood bubbled. It is my belief that he missed. No drop of water went past your lips. Your last drink (if in those final moments, you thought to swallow) was your own blood. Will you have a vampirical after life? Will you rise up from the shallow grave my father put you in, to stalk around the house and converse with your mother and aunt? They were there, of course. I do not know if they knew as much about death as they know of hunger and sex. They know sadness, of that I am sure. I saw it on your mother's face as she tried to lick you back into life. She knew that her litter had shrunk by one.
