i have yet to find a way to accept that love leaves. all the love that has ever detached itself from my physical body in my 30 years of life has left a fingerprint that i don’t have it in me to clear away; to even try.
oddly, i have found it even more challenging to accept that loves comes back.
and yet it did, on an august afternoon that introduced me to bertie. i would be sitting her and her three siblings (7, if you counted her wandering outdoor cousins at the time) in the coming weeks, and it was time to get the rundown of their care.
when i first saw bertie, her brown fur decorated with a dozen different patterns and bright green eyes the color of a pure sage crystal, i saw an old friend.
as i got to know her over my time caring for her, it became more and more clear – in her uncharacteristically mini frame (despite her being a senior), her deep and infinite pupils, and her affinity for sleeping on my pillow and licking my curly hair as soon as i woke up, she was telling me she was back for me. crazy as it may sound, there were times i’d stare into her eyes and just…understand.
she made me feel like she was zoe, my childhood cat who i’d lost 9 years prior.
zoe was technically passed along to me by my older sister when i was 4 years old. she was perfect, the most beautiful calico kitty you could ever imagine. her orange was bright, her white was angelic, and her black was like silk. she walked like naomi campbell: lithe, poised, regal. her meow was a song and her purrs felt like a hug from god.
we did everything together. if i were laying down on my carpet watching rogers and hammerstein’s cinderella (starring whitney houston and brandy) for the 850th time, she was curled up beside me: me, yin; her, yang. if i was napping on the bed, she was cuddling me, her head facing the opposite way (or, equally as often, kneading a knot the size and feel of a small tumbleweed into my hair). if i was playing on the computer, she was sitting beside it, as if supervising my play.
she was the love of my life and my best friend. she beat stress-induced diabetes (brought on by the lawless arrival of her kitty cousin scarlet, and promptly cured the moment scarlet moved out), ocular cancer, only had one eye for her last few years, and passed away at age 23 (i was only 21). my heart still hasn’t fully recovered and likely never will.
but then i met bertie, and i immediately loved her so much my heart felt like it was going to melt out of my chest. her energy was so familiar. her energy was partly zoe.
every interaction i had with her felt like seeing an old friend after years apart and wanting to soak up every tiny thing they do so you never forget it again. her meows were soft (sometimes so soft that no sound would come out at all), her fur was so unique (i especially loved the tiger-like pattern on the right side of her torso), and her little paws felt so warm and careful walking up my stomach for a cuddle. the first time i sat her, she was perky and demure. the second and final time, my girl was ready to go.
bertie passed away last week after a brief battle with advanced kidney disease. i had finished babysitting her just three days prior, having been with her and her siblings for two weeks. she waited for her parents to come home to say goodbye. she knew. cats know.
on my last day at the house, knowing it would likely be the last time i ever saw her, i kneeled on the ground sobbing and trying to make eye contact with those sage portals tucked inside her dark hiding spot under the couch, willing my own eyes to let a little more light in just this once. i thanked zoe for coming back to see me and asked bertie to promise me that she’d come back again – in another form, in another life.
because she did. and she will again.
bertie was perhaps my greatest realization that loves comes back. when we lose it in one form, it returns in a thousand others – and this i have known for a while, but i had never realized it could come back in such a poignant physical form.
when we lose somebody we love, we may often find ourselves saying that we “keep thinking they’re about to come back”: to come back from the store; to come downstairs when we walk in the door; to come out from under the couch.
and though they won’t, they are.
love returns.
in the soft steps of a deer outside my front door, protecting me from harm, my grandfather miguel returns.
in a rock i find in the middle of the river like the ones he’d leave at my parents’ doorstep, he returns.
in a glimpse of la virgencita on the stoop of a roman home – my grandmother jennie returns.
in a gaze from an animal that holds something language could never interpret anyway – love returns.
and returns.
and returns.
i have always known some small part of this phenomenon, that a spirit we once loved on earth never leaves. like a loved one dipping out for only a moment to get the paper from outside or pick up ingredients for our favorite meal from the store, love only ever steps out for a moment to once again return – either with something new, or as something new.
think: a seed in your hand doesn’t disappear when placed deep inside the earth. it returns, first as a bud, then as a sapling, then as a tree.
this is why loss is perhaps only arbitrary. it’s just a transformation. love transforms, it comes in, it goes out.
and love returns. again and again.
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for bertie and zoe. i miss you. come back soon.