Between Bruises & Blooms

I know they aren't real.

I know.

They are ink
and voices in my headphones,
forests built from sentences,
cats who have never pressed
their paws into actual earth.

Still—

one falls from a bridge
after saving a child

and suddenly
there are tears
burning behind my eyes.

One loses her mate.

One buries her kit.

One gives everything
to save someone
who gets to keep breathing
because they don't.

And apparently
my heart has never learned
the difference

between a grave
dug beneath an oak tree

and one
written between pages.

Maybe grief
doesn't care
what something is made of.

Blood.

Memory.

Ink.

Maybe loving a story
means giving it
somewhere inside you
to become alive.

And maybe that is why

at five in the morning,

with a house gone quiet
and fictional stars
burning above
a fictional forest,

I am crying

for cats
who never existed

like I knew them.