Dear Peter, Kleine Katze, Mogli and Fussel,
I don’t think people really understand what losing each of you did to me.
With every one of you that died, something in me got worse. Something got darker. My humor turned another notch blacker, more bitter, more sinister. Not because I wanted it to. It just happened. Loss after loss after loss, and now I can feel it in the way I think, the way I talk, the way I look at life.
It’s been close to five months since Fussel left this realm. It is getting easier. Slowly. Very slowly. But I still miss your touch every single day. Every night. Every time I make coffee. Every time I leave my office. Every time I walk out of that room and there is no you waiting there, no little moment, no little routine, no little piece of comfort.
Right now the joy of leaving my home office feels close to the minimum possible. That house, this whole daily routine, all of it feels emptier without you. And I don’t mean in some dramatic way. I mean in the real way. In the everyday way. In the way I wake up already knowing you’re not there. In the weight on my chest when I try to fall asleep. In the kind of silence that does not feel peaceful, only wrong.
Two new rescues have joined the household. One of them even looks a bit like Fussel, though I did not pick them for that reason. They deserve love, and they get it. But life has not become better by any measure or means. If anything, it has just become sadder without you. They do not fill that void. They cannot. That place is yours.
I even have pictures of all of you rotating on my Apple Watch. It hurts to see your faces every day. Maybe that’s why I only wear it on my two workout days each week now. Because every glance at my wrist is a reminder of all of you, and of the fact that none of you are here anymore.
What hurts even more is that your faces are slowly fading from my memory. I wish that was not true. I want to be better than that. I want to remember every detail forever. But I ain’t. And that pain sits deep, because it feels like losing small pieces of you all over again.
People say time helps. Maybe it does. A little. Enough to keep moving, maybe. But it does not bring any of you back. It does not make the house feel alive again. It does not make me whole again.
I wish to rejoin all of you one day. And these days, with how miserable I feel, I can’t even honestly say that thought scares me the way it should.
I miss all of you.
More than I can explain.
And parts of me went with you.
Franz