I had yet to migrate these photos of Larenti from my old photoblog, xenogere unseen.  Now is as appropriate a time as any.

A home with some of the children gone.  That’s how it feels.  I keep stepping over him when he’s not there, hearing his voice when it doesn’t exist, feeling his fur under my fingers as I drift off to sleep.  Fantasies of a wounded heart.

Time’s altar is a fierce place to exist.  It takes at will, sacrifices on whims we cannot understand.  It rests stained with the blood of all who have been lost.

He nuzzles my hand, reaches out and grabs it with his paw to let me know I’m not done petting him.  He says as much as he looks at me directly and lets me lose myself in that jeweled, peridot universe defined by his eyes.

Or at least it seems to me, but in truth that was last week.  Now only his memory remains.