So many years ago (I can no longer remember how many), you were.
Looking at your eyes, they look back into mine
I fight the throat lump, eyes welling with liquid sentimentality.
Exuberance, youthfulness, perfection.
Every whisker and hair reflect shiny sleek cleanliness of life in its prime.
Your facial features, perfectly chiseled, ears flopped over, perfectly break in unison.
Wet, glistening nose, forehead wrinkled with attention
The symmetry of your markings
Crafted as only a cosmic creator could have executed.
In your place now, there is only the ache.
It arrived the day you left. It remained for a time, then disappeared.
Returning here and there, less and less over time, the memory of you enters my mind.
Compelled by a hint of what was you.
The smell of your rawhide, half-chewed, gnarled, by your canine enthusiasm.
The hole in the back of the leather couch, where as a puppy you chewed it apart
Now a patch in its place; roughly stitched edges doing a terrible job of pretending to blend in.
The dusty dog blanket, still sequined with your hairs
The ever fading earthy scent of you lingers; I wouldn’t wash it after you left, to keep you near.
Those painful last days have long ago passed. Healed over by time’s scar tissue.
You have long since been returned to the earth, wherever you are now.
Your dust and bone blended with the soil and trash.
In this shutter snapped moment, you are alive for as long as this image remains.
You will fade, yellowing with time and light, or be lost to an accidental deletion, emptied.
This last piece of you will be lost.
Never to me.
Not until I can no longer remember.
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