A collection of stories about the painfulness of losing someone

RIP Wesley (27 April 2020 - 29 April 2023)
RIP Tia (2011 - 01 October 2025)

Saving You Saved Me

It arrived in a cardboard box with holes punched through the sides, anxious but willing. I had saved it from a situation I prefer not to recall, and perhaps that’s why the seller had been so eager to let it go. It had three splotches on its nose arranged in a triangle and would sleep in a perfect spiral, as if following some geometric principle I couldn’t grasp. The pattern made sense to it, and I trusted that understanding

For weeks it would not play. Real ferrets, I had read, are creatures of boundless energy, but this one moved with a strange economy, each gesture calculated. When I dangled toys before it, it regarded them with what I can only describe as polite bewilderment, the way a diplomat might examine a foreign currency of no use in his own country

“You must be very patient,” I found myself saying to it one evening, though I wasn’t sure if I was offering comfort or asking for it. It had positioned itself precisely in the centre of its cage laying on its front and was staring at me. A friendly smile and sparkle in its eye

The change came gradually. First, it began to follow me from room to room, always maintaining the same careful distance - close enough to observe, far enough to flee. Then one morning I woke to find it had somehow opened its cage and was sitting beside my bed, waiting. Not with a pet’s eager anticipation, but with the patience of someone keeping an appointment

I did not like the box it came in, and though I had significantly upgraded its cage for its comfort, I did not like the cage either. As the change became more pronounced, the time spent in its cage grew shorter and shorter. Toys still confused it, but we had a mutual understanding on how to play with them. At any rate, it was far more concerned with climbing up my leg and being held than with toys. We ditched the cage, except for where it slept, and both became more free

The morning I found the cage empty and the house door ajar, something broke open in my chest. I ran into the street in nothing but underwear, rain soaking through to my skin and the gravel piercing my feet, screaming its name in a banshee’s cry into the grey desolate dawn. Three hours I searched, checking under cars, behind dumpsters, anywhere a small body might hide or be hiding. It had to shelter itself from the rain, because I was unable to protect it. Goosebumps on my legs, nipples hard, and my heart breaking. I understood then how completely I had been claimed - not just as an owner, but as something far more desperate. I was its sanctuary, and I had failed

It saw me before I saw it and emerged from some plant bed soaked, dirty, and shivering. Just as I was. It ran directly to me with a recognition that felt like coming home and it bit my ankle. Alerting me? Disciplining me? I scooped it up, both of us trembling and hearts mending, I realised that whatever had been broken in its past was also broken in me

“You’ve been on an adventure,” I said to it. I could read the reply in its eyes

'it's only an adventure if I'm with you.'

I would often catch myself speaking to it as if were a person pretending to be an animal, rather than the other way round. I have tamed it, and it has tamed me; we are responsible for each other. Though taming suggests a wildness conquered, what we have instead is a mutual bewilderment - two beings who have agreed to a contract neither of us can quite read, bound by the strange gravity of having nowhere else to go

At night, curling against my chest, I would feel the weight of being someone’s entire universe. It taught me that love and captivity are sometimes indistinguishable

But now he is gone. Torn from my chest through innocent means - the same force that gives life eventually reclaims it.

We knew this ending was written into our beginning, the way winter is promised in every spring leaf. The contract we signed was love, and love’s cruelest clause is that it must end. Not through failure or betrayal, but through the simple, devastating fact of being mortal creatures who dare to matter completely to each other

The house feels wrong now. I catch myself muttering to him in empty rooms, speaking into a silence that once held soft scratches on hardwood and delightful dooks.

The paperwork of grief, I discover, is never-ending. Each day requires new signatures on documents I cannot read, in a language that makes less sense the longer I study it

He is lost. And so am I

The Architecture of Days

The cat had been there longer than most of the furniture, longer than the wallpaper, than some of the people

Seventeen years is not measured in time, but the slow and inevitable accumulation of agreements. The house had organised itself around these terms, and we had all signed without question

True; in the beginning there had been negotiations. The cat had strong opinions about what brand of tuna it would eat, whose bed it would doze on at 3pm, and that tickling behind the ear was fine (but the tummy was strictly off limits)

The negotiations, at some point, ceased. We just knew. The agreements became the architecture of our day

But now the veterinarian had stamped the file with a date, and I’m told it is kindness. Perhaps it is. But no one consulted the house, which doesn’t know that the services it had been running for what felt like a lifetime were about to be decommissioned. The conservatory would still reach hellfire temperatures every summer, but will have no one to bask in its heat all day; the clank of the metal tin opener will still echo through the kitchen, but the detective will no longer be investigating

There’s a folder somewhere with all the documentation: the first vet visit, the insurance policy that could not save it. Now filed under “concluded”. But the muscle memory of creeping out of bed so not to wake it, the expectation of weight and warmth at certain hours - these cannot be so neatly archived

I wish to explain, but how can you say goodbye when there is no language for such a thing? We built our communication on presence, on the simple fact of sharing space and time; a language without words. Only the endless repetition of being here, being here, being here

“For your own good,” I try to convince us both. But it is no good

From First to Last

I walked down a road I used to walk in the summer of 2022. It took me a moment to realise why it felt significant - this was the first time since you left. Then I began counting backwards through all the other firsts I hadn’t noticed passing: the first morning I didn’t look for you, the first time I wore that shirt without thinking of how you’d climb up it, the first time I heard that song without you on my chest

The list had been manageable at first. Everything was a first. Everything hurt with the sharp clarity of novelty. But now the firsts were piling up unnoticed, each one a small betrayal I hadn’t consented to. Soon I would have done everything without you. Worn every shirt, walked every street, heard every song. The world would be completely remapped, every landmark now defined by absence rather than presence

I used to think time would bring distance, that moving forward meant moving away. But standing on that road, I understood the cruelty of it: I am propelling myself, unwillingly but necessarily, into a future that grows further from you with each mundane act - and yet you are no more distant than you were the day you left. The gap doesn’t widen. It just becomes more thoroughly surrounded by a life you’re not in

The mathematics of loss, I’ve learned, are paradoxical. The more I do, the more I’ve done without you. But doing nothing would make no difference at all

Miserable, I walked down the road