I feel your vibrating throat, your fur parting around my fingertips, the waxy bristles of your whiskers. Your eyes close. Your eyes open, and I see that they have become two lapping dark pools of love.
You are not the kitten who tumbled into my headlights like a paper lantern on a rainy night. You are not that kitten, but you purr like him, and I know he's still there. To me you stepped out of a dream, singular and fragile as a trembling white petal. Nature’s softest and most hopeful prayer, that's what you were: a kitten. That's what you were, and that's how I found you. Your eyes were two glass orbs, so shiny they looked warm to the touch, shiny in the way brand-new things are, shining in a way that cracked me open.
In the world there is darkness. There is darkness so complete that it squeezes you until you’re a crumpled jagged husk. There is also impersonal darkness, the kind responsible for the churning guts of nature, the kind that makes the kitten suffer or the owl starve.
Leonard, my Lenny: I can protect you from the crushing talons. I will shelter you from the hardness of this world. For me, you will smooth its jagged edges and sweeten its bitter tastes. The milky smell of your fur spills like sunlight through my window and I am aglow, you have set me aglow. I think you and I have answered some secret prayer. Yes, to see a creature made vulnerable to you, and to meet its eyes with love: Leonard, you have shown me true power.
This short prose piece is about my cat Leonard, click here to see a picture of him :)
© 2025. This work is openly licensed via CC BY-NC-ND.
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