Hulo

Life is truly beyond our grasp. Once it's gone nothing remains: no blood tear sweat and it slips by even beyond memory. And today it might bother me, this transience, this fear of (from past experiences I know it's true) not remembering. But in a month even this will not remain.
Maybe it is just me. Another might have gone star gazing and asked--কোথায় তুমি ছোট বৌঠান, কোথায় তুমি ছোট বৌঠান.
Do many deaths make one hard hearted? Greedy for scraps of happiness and in equal measure miserly and suspicious of happiness? Maybe. Today I might say I have lost so many loved ones, already, at twenty six. But would that be true? As every new death recalls past losses in a procession of those 'barnacle deads' I realise that I've missed one here or there with a start. Too long ago, to recall their personal quirks.
When Polau died aged three months I mourned like I had never before or after. At the same time knowing full well that three months is all too short a time and soon, now, it'll be three years since 10 June 2008. He remains the symbol of grief for me, but do I really grieve for him anymore? Is all grief then a parody of itself? A symbolic expiation of the guilt of continuing to live, remaining alive.
And after all, one would say, and I would agree there's a difference between loving a human and loving a beast after all. Not quantitative for me at least, but you cannot go to school or share a beer with a cat. And that's that.

[It might have been good to end in a fashionably bitter, cynical note as above. But Hulo has been with us for seven long years. The discrete-est gentleman there ever was. At least post neutering.
He'd become fairly quiet and kept himself to himself in the last two years, I guess. I wasn't there for the last two years. So I don't know if quietening down meant becoming less demanding about affection.

I don't miss home. At all. The idea of a home I created for myself appeals to me much more. But I will miss the feeling of cats lying all over and around me, over and under the woollen blanket in winter. And Hulo, as always inbetween my feet, ever the most sensitive sleeper so that if I happened to even think of changing position instead of lying rigidly on my back all night he'd jump off and go, silently reproachful. I loved him very very much.]