Something I still have yet to accept

I still have yet to truly accept that Tinta has left us. It is true that I saw her sweet body slim down to a wisp, from seven pounds to probably less than four. It’s true that I crouched beside her as she lay on her side and took her last breath. It’s a fact that the pads on her little paws began to cool quickly, and her eyes clouded as if she had cataracts. When I lifted her body, wrapped now in one of John’s old river driver shirts, her stiffness made Tinta feel heavy, much heavier than she’d weighed at her healthiest.

In the dark when the full moon was right above the magnolia tree, I placed the bundle of white shirt and dark cat into the hole John had dug by the elm. I lit incense. We placed autumn flowers from the yard – purple asters, mums, late snapdragons – beside Tinta. I kneeled in the damp dirt. I know this. It’s been nearly two weeks. I know this.

I know that when I’m alone in the house I will not hear the soft clicking of Tinta’s back nails on the old linoleum floor in the kitchen. I know that what catches my eye in the TV room on the Turkish rug is John’s black suede shoes, not Tinta sleeping in a patch of sunlight. When I pass the bedroom, Tinta is not curled up on the woven spread with loose threads; she is not on the windowsill above the radiator, watching birds in the camellia bushes.

When I enter the back door and call out, “Soy yo (it’s me),” Tinta will not trot in from some corner of the house, and jump onto the kitchen chair expectantly. I don’t have to interrupt my writing constantly to give her a fresh spoonful of food from the can.

But I still haven’t accepted Tinta’s absence. Not yet. She is still more here than not here, in my awareness. In my habits, in the way I know this house to be. I’m afraid I’ll start to search for her, the tiny cat with so many places to hide: on the quilts in the closet, beneath the bookshelf that serves as the headboard, down in the deep grapevine basket nestled in laundry. My heart is still reaching out to hers, still communicating, as if Tinta’s heart can still answer back.