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@joelle-stone

Okay! 😀 *turns on music that I think will work for Silent*

((Hi, this is me from the future after I’m done writing this post. Goodness gracious that turned out depressing. Apologies. . .))

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The sun was setting. My heart was heavy in my chest, almost as though someone had tied a stone to it, and had I been capable of crying, my eyes would have been as dry as stones in the the Sahara, with not a drop of water left to shed as a tear.

So this is what grief feels like.

Sadness I had felt before. Sadness that I couldn’t be like my adoptive, furry siblings, sadness that I was silent, and that it restricted me.

This was nothing like that.

I suppose that I ought to count myself lucky that I had never experienced the death of someone close to me before, and I guess that I was.

I certainly didn’t feel lucky, though.

Perhaps if I had dealt with this before, it would be easier now.

Did things like this even get easier over time?

I had no idea, no experience from which to draw.

 

The sun sank behind the distant hills, its final rays painting the clouds around it orange, yellow, and pink, and sweeping the rest of the sky’s expanse with twilight. Glimmering stars twinkled and laughed from galaxies light years away, at last peeking their shining faces through the atmosphere after waiting all day for the sun’s departure.

On any other night, I would have marveled at their beauty, just as I always did, but right now my heart was heavy, and my mind consumed with thoughts of Akaya.

 

What had it been like for her?

Had she been swept away by the currents, tangled in the branches of some fallen tree, or in the remains of some human trap?

Had she struggled? Fought?

Whatever she had done, it hadn’t worked. She was gone now.

Gone.

Perhaps it would have been easier to deal with this if I’d been born an animal that could cry. Then I could have released the pain in floods of tears, and been done with it.

But now. . .

 

A new thought flitted into my mind. A terrible thought. Frantically, I pushed it away, but it had already done its damage.

If I’d gotten there sooner, flown faster, would I have been able to save her?

I curled up on the soft grass a small distance away from the others, and hid my face beneath my wing so that they couldn’t see my pain.