The Ghost of Soft Footsteps

 a poem by Roger B. Rueda

When my cat died, it was a hairline fracture,
a break so small I almost missed it.
It sat quiet until I tried to breathe—
then it spread, tender as a bruise.

She came like stray things do,
slipping through some unguarded door,
paws light as dust.
She made herself a shape that fit:
a patch of sunlight, a hum in the dark.
No name for how she filled the silence,
no warning for how she’d leave it behind.

A cold took her, something so ordinary
it felt like insult.
One day she was there—
her purr a sound the house learned to sing—
and then, the quiet.
The kind of quiet that sits down beside you,
hands folded neatly in its lap.

Grief doesn’t arrive with a shout;
it seeps, slow as fog,
finding its way into the corners
where she once curled to dream.
The sunlight she loved slants differently now,
thin and unsure,
as though it knows it can’t warm the floor
where her body used to be.

Her toys remain like artifacts,
a feather abandoned mid-chase,
the bell too quiet for its own good.
Dust settles on them like forgetting,
though I know better:
what dust covers, it keeps.

I dream of her sometimes.
Dreams are fragile things—
she brushes past me, soft and certain,
her weight still light as a whisper.
But I wake, and she’s gone.
Mornings now are sharper.
The clock ticks louder, each beat
a reminder of her absence.

Outside, the birds are still at it.
They flit from branch to branch, oblivious.
Why would they know?
What loss could birds possibly bear?
I stand at the window,
half-waiting for her shadow
to stretch itself back into the room.

Grief is not a tidal wave;
it’s a smudge of days,
one dragging into the next,
until even her fur, once vivid,
fades into something more like light.

But her love stays—
the kind of weight
that doesn’t break you,
only presses, presses
until you learn to carry it.

I stand by the door where she used to wait,
hands empty, breath caught.
She had all the patience in the world,
and now, I wait for nothing in particular—
a sound, a shift, something small
that says I’ll learn this new silence.

But I haven’t. Not yet.
Some things linger,
like ghosts,
like sunlight
still trying to be warm.