It was the beginning of an end.
The cat arrived in the fifth hour of an unnamed dusk, when the sky trembled as though recalling a half-forgotten fable it had never sworn to live through. She padded out of a violet mist so thick it seemed stitched from the breath of old dreams, her white fur glowing with the quiet arrogance of a moon that had just remembered its divinity. The wreath of flowers on her head hummed with colours that human eyes were not credentialed to witness. Some petals drooped like memories too tired to go on pretending. Others shivered with a desperate insistence to be believed.
She settled herself in the middle of a room that had not existed an hour before—a room shaped like the nostalgic echo of someone’s childhood bedroom, except the walls throbbed gently, as if translating a heartbeat. I felt the floor pulse under my feet. The air smelled of lavender and something softer than silence, something so tender that even my loudest thoughts tiptoed.
The cat looked at me without performing the action of looking. Her blue eyes held an old sorrow—ancient, unbroken, and patient. A sorrow that did not ache but witnessed. She flicked her tail once, a delicate movement that unlatched something heavy inside my chest.
“You’ve come for the hauntings,” I said, though no breath escaped my mouth.
She nodded—a small, elegant dip of her head that made the flowers rustle like whispered regrets that were almost ready to confess.
The room leaned in to listen.
The cat began to expand—not in shape, but in significance. Her outline blurred at its edges, dissolving into the air until her presence seeped into the furniture, the walls, the breathing space around me, and then into me. I felt her perched inside my ribcage, watching the dim hallways of my heart with the patience of someone rereading a beloved book, knowing exactly where the story bruises.
And then the strangest thing happened: memories I had forgotten on purpose began drifting into the half-light.
A paper boat I folded as a child, sinking in a puddle that looked deep enough to drown a universe. A hand I once let go of too soon. A question someone had asked me with trembling sincerity—”Will you stay?”—and how I had answered with a silence that echoed through years like a poorly tuned bell.
The cat blinked. With each blink, the room rearranged itself into a new version of the truth, as though reality were merely a suggestion.
“Feelings,” she said without sound, “are creatures that refuse domestication. They choose their hosts. They choose the rooms they haunt. They choose nights when the moon looks too distracted to intervene.”
Her unspoken voice rippled through me. It poured warm, then cold, then into some third temperature that felt like clarity and delirium braided together.
I finally understood the flowers.
Each bloom on her wreath represented a feeling that had once chosen me. The daisies glowed with forgotten joys—bright, unembarrassed, almost childish in their boldness. The roses curled inward with the ache of what I had loved too fiercely, the kind of love that leaves scorch marks. The purple wildflowers pulsed faintly with the near-madness of yearning—the delicate insanity that turns ordinary souls into poets.
And beneath the whole crown, tied loosely around her neck, the pale pink ribbon shimmered. It held the quiet weight of regret and hope braided into one impossible thread.
“Why do you come to me like this?” I asked, though the question felt like it had been waiting in the room long before I arrived.
Everything stilled. Even the walls seemed to hold their breath.
The cat rose slowly, as though negotiating with gravity rather than submitting to it. Each step she took pressed softly against the floor, yet the sound of her paws echoed inside my mind like a broken lullaby humming its last memory.
She reached me and rested her forehead against my chest.
For a single, trembling moment, I saw myself as she saw me: a shifting constellation of half-processed sorrows, half-born dreams, and one tiny bright ember of courage buried under layers of polite denial.
“Because you,” she whispered into the chambers of my being, “are the only one who keeps pretending you are un-haunted.”
The flowers on her wreath glowed like a quiet revelation.
The room dissolved around us, unfolding into a vast field of starlit grass that rippled like a cosmic ocean. The air grew lighter, sharper, almost holy.
The cat turned and walked away—shrinking in distance yet growing heavier in meaning. She moved toward the horizon, where the sky bent inward like the spine of a closing book. She paused there, offering a final chance to follow. The kind of silent invitation that births epics.
I didn’t follow. Some hauntings are sovereign things. They must be faced where they began.
She dipped her head one last time. The flowers dimmed. The ribbon fluttered in a breeze I could feel only in memory.
“Remember,” she said, though the voice may have been my own. “A heart without ghosts is a heart that has not lived.”
And then she stepped into the twilight seam, vanishing with the grace of something that had never needed to exist in the first place. She left behind the scent of wildflowers, the ache of unmade choices, and the unbearable lightness of having known her.
A beginning of an end.