Cat Tails Series

Little Prints Bindu

Prologue

“If you want your words to have power, you must first cull from your speech and thoughts all the words you would not Will to empower.”

Lord Michael

March 28^th, 2016

“Please, don’t go,” she panted, lifting its hind feet, allowing its head to drop gently, despite the panic drowning reason, praying the blood would drain from its lungs, hoping something was still there. I watched her and, suddenly I knew, as she spoke my name – she thought that limp form was me. I’d never realized how much she loved me until just that moment.

“Please Bindu,” she gasped and pried its jaws apart. She covered its mouth and nose with her mouth and breathed into the lungs that would take no air, so full blood. She did it again and again, until I became afraid she too would die—trying to push me back into that meat-suit, pissing on the tile floor around her where she lay, an old woman, rendered—in that very moment—ancient by despair.

I feared I’d killed her—her whom I had come, again and again, into a world I hated—to encourage. It was why I’d always cried the way I had – the plaintive cry of a child at once happy to see someone they loved and yet annoyed because they’d been roused from their dreams where they prefered to be.

She gulped air as she laid the body aside and wept, laying the back of her hand against its flesh, checking for the failing heat that signaled I was gone. She breathed, with determination, a few deep gasps.

“Okay…” she nodded and puffed a few more breaths, fighting a rising tide of despair. “So,” she shrugged, “you’re dead… again,” she asserted and then she couldn’t help but weep, her body quaking. She defied it all once more, shoving the air from her form several times to reclaim control. She had to do it many times, the waves of sentiment churning under self-control. It was like fighting a tidal bore, barely holding herself together, and she knew it could not last. She rose onto legs, wobbling with exhaustion and pain, and fetched my pillow. One-handed, she pulled the towel on the rack to the floor and sopped up my piss. Then she laid the pillow down and fetched a clean towel from the closet. She spread it on the pillow, and I was almost sure she was going to be alright. Then she lifted the body that had been mine and laid it on the pillow that had been my bed. She looked away, beginning to hurry as her skin rose in gooseflesh, and she took a cup from the countertop to splash fresh water on the floor. She mopped it all up with another towel from the shower.

Stripping her clothes as she limped down the hall to the laundry area, she sucked in her grief, time after time, taking the series of deep breaths that she expelled in a rush each time sorrow tried to claim her. She pressed the soiled fabrics into the washer and poured in a measure of soap and started the machine before hobbling back to the shower, only glancing at the body on the pillow en route, lest the image destroy her too soon. She showered quickly and then dressed in comfortable pajamas, stretchy pants and a top she would not mind being seen dead in—should she die, because she knew, it – the control – would not last. Soon, the grief would propagate through the body tissues into which she had always imploded when emotions overwhelmed. The rolling brown-outs of consciousness would come—seizure upon seizure that made her so ill she’s wish to be done, well and truly, with the tragic dream world in which she no longer believed.

“Bindu,” she whispered, “forgive me,” and she began to weep in earnest. She howled like a hound as she passed her palms over the body that had been mine, and then she washed her hands and retreated to her bed, where she lay, wishing to die and calculating the impact.

Would she have the strength to bury her Bindu? No, she decided, I need help, I heard her thinking as clearly as any words she had ever spoken aloud. It had always been like that for us. I was not, strictly speaking “a cat”. I was a “familiar” – a supportive spirit who had come many times into her life to encourage her to stay in the world until she finished her work. The first time I had been but two months old when she accidentally killed me. Making her bed, a child of six, she’d rolled it away from the wall to tuck in the fitted sheets at the head. She couldn’t know from the foot of the bed that I was between it and the wall when she used all of her scant body mass to hurl the bed back. Caught between the metal frame of the bed and the wall, my death was instantaneous. She never, ever forgot. It was that way with everything for her. She took pain and anger, and any kind of hurtful thing, so deeply into her being that it was completely absorbed there, seeming to disappear beneath the turbulent surface of her energetic persona. The regrets, she cataloged and never forgot. She held her happiness hostage to every tiny failure or lapse in the heroic levels of devotion her own troth demanded. I considered that this emotional charging was how we’d become so entangled as she raised the cell phone and called her friend.

“Kari?”

“Hey! …Wait a minute, you don’t sound right. Are you okay?”

Cailín choked on a wave of grief. “Uuum, not really. My Bindu died and, I hate to bother you but, it’s knocked the legs right out from under me. I need help.”

“Where are you? Are you in the house?”

“Oh, yeah. I managed to get the mess cleaned up, mostly, and to get a shower and get dressed in case the seizures– well, you know.”

“You’re in bed then, right? I’m coming right now,” Kari panted and Cailín could hear her preparing to head her way.

“Oh, yeah. I’m in bed, waiting for it to start lest it catch me on my feet in an inconvenient place. It’s starting.”

“Anything you need?” Kari fumbled through keys as she hefted herself into her truck. Swept by a wave of rising nausea, Cailín rolled from the bed and stumbled down the hall, cats around her feet for every step and she realized, looking at them, that she had to live.

“I’m getting a pot from the kitchen now. Otherwise, no. Thank you,” she panted, holding the wall as she rounded the corner to the kitchen. She pressed towards the sink and leaned over it.

“Be right there, Sweetie. You go lay down right away when you can.” Cailín heard the background sounds that told her Kari was underway already.

“Roger, that,” she choked as the focus of her struggle shifted—from grieving to surviving. “The front door’s unlocked. I’m headed for the bathroom, then bed. Thank you Kari.”

“Stop thanking me and get to bed!” Kari fussed in the way that only she could, saying I love you! with her very exasperation. “Yes’am,” Cailín hung up the phone and groped through the lower cabinets for a pot tall enough to contain any splash, and then she made for the bathroom where she could sit, knowing the body was beginning the first wave of purging. Color drained from her face. Her skin rose again in gooseflesh, dazzling with electric perspiration, and she felt cold even though it was a warm day. She heaved in wracking spasms that left her too weak to stand anyway and so she sat, looking through the door out at the pillow and the body on it, and she wept, hoping the weeping would divert some of the trauma from her nervous system. When she was at last able to stand she washed out the pot and set it nearby and then brushed her teeth.

“I love you forever, Bindu,” she breathed as she looked down, holding the door jamb, head swimming and vision spangling. “But I can’t breathe now, and I have to lay down.” She blew her nose and rifled the medicine cabinet for Xanax and took one mg. Then she snorted Afrin “Heavy Congestion” and collapsed in her bed.

Kari stayed with her for half the day and well into the evening. She buried the body for Cailín—a thought that made Cailín smile with new appreciation of an old expression: Friends help friends move. Good friends help friends move the body. But the waves of rolling brown outs—near losses of consciousness, tachycardia, gooseflesh and nausea, came and came. The thought My Bindu paraded through her mind again and again, but she had to concentrate on riding out the neurological storm so she didn’t allow herself to dwell on me at all.

“You are pale as a sheet and cold to the touch,” Kari sighed. I’ve called your sister Chrissy in Tampa and she’s on her way. Cailín felt terrible. All this fuss, I heard her think. “Now I want to call the EMTs,” Kari breathed. Cailín’s expression morphed—pleading, but she was too weak to argue. Kari took her hand. “Honey, I know it makes you uncomfortable but, imagine how I’ll feel – how your sister will feel, if I don’t call the EMTs and you die.” Kari stared into her eyes and squeezed Cailín’s hand. Cailín nodded and Kari dialed, 911.

***

She had been writing on the day she lost me. Her back recently injured at work, sitting or standing had been challenging for several months and she lived with constant pain. This particular morning she had been, nonetheless, joyous. Writing of one of her favorite “fictional” characters, an ancient and ominously beautiful man of towering intellect and intense presence, Cailín wrote of sharing with “Levi” the near death experience she’d had nearly forty years before. The single most important thing that had ever happened to her in her life had been her death, a fact she found strangely amusing. During the NDE, as they were called, she had been given an entirely secular revelation of how the machine of the universe and her world worked and how she had, indeed been creating her own misery. The insight had so revolutionized her understanding that she had determined to return to the world to share it. Like a perceptual bolder tossed into the sea of humanity’s suffering, she’d believed the vast ripples of the new understanding could propagate through time. She saw this outcome as “priceless and worth any personal pain she might endure by returning to a body so shattered it literally knew not up from down”. But she’d have to explain it—to say it, just right. Spending the last nearly forty years polishing renditions, she rose from writing of the experience as she’d shared it with Levi feeling it had been her best effort yet. Ambling down the hall to her bedroom to rest her mind, she had found me, gasping, drooling blood and weakening quickly with every burbling breath.

The juxtaposition had been a terrible shock. She felt she’d been doing what God himself would want her to do, with devoted ardor, and yet she’d returned to find me dying. But this was not the deepest source of her pain. Her suffering – the very suffering she had just been writing about overcoming – came from her own sense of guilt—of having failed me.

My mother, Cailín had called “Maya” and she had, just days after giving birth to me in the hay of the shed row stalls, disappeared. Cailín, of course, took me inside and bottle raised me. I’d slept in the bed with her while she barely rested at all, so concerned was she to keep me warm and not waken to find she’d squished me in her sleep. After a week, Cailín placed a pillow between her pillow and the headboard, and she had me sleep on top of her head, a decision that worked for both of us. I loved the scent of her hair and her head was very warm, and she could feel me there and hear me if I wakened mewling and asking to be fed. Named for the energy center at the top of the head where some spiritual disciplines believe we are most directly connected to the divine, she had called me “Bindu” after that so called “chakra”. I just loved her warmth and playing with, and in, her hair and I very quickly forgot my mother entirely.

Cailín forgot what it was I had done that had caused her to put me out into the yard as an a young adult, but to me it did not matter. I had a sacred function to perform for her. Familiars each have a purpose and being in the world was simply not worth the trouble if I was not to be fulfilling my own. My mother, Maya’s, cause has ever been to inspire Cailín’s creativity. The familiar Cailín calls “Jazzmine” functions similarly, while “Dancerman” gives her hugs and assails her amorously, reminding her she is beautiful. My purpose was to be for her the contact with her deepest, purest self—the tender selves most human beings hide from the world. I was the embodiment of her innocence, and so I could not understand it when she ejected me from the house for being a cat and, in my innocent cat nature, killing one of her birds. This is a guiltless thing for a cat to do. We know after all, that death is just one stage of an endless cycle and that the bird lived again and again, and so I became a hunter and outcast and stared at her from afar, catching her gaze often. She called me but, so wounded was I, that I came close only when it was meal time, and even then, I shunned her attempts to pet me. It had been a bad decision on my part, but I felt wrongly rejected and so this tantrum went on for four years. I was feeling very poorly indeed when I decided to break my protest.

Something was in my chest. I could barely breathe and my breaths gurgled deep inside where the sweet air put life in my form. When I coughed, there was blood in the fluid in my mouth and throat and, so weary I thought I might be dying, I decided I should say goodbye. The gate was a long way from the front porch where I normally met her for dinner when she came home in the evenings. I staggered out and waited and was there, sitting where she would have to see me when she got out of the car to open the gate. I mustered my energy so, when I heard the sound of her car’s engine and she turned into the drive, I stood and waited. My heart thundering with joy again to be near her, I raised my tail and slumped against her legs when she fiddled with the gate chain.

“Bindu!” she breathed with earnest elation in her voice, and I knew I had been wrong to stay so far from her, for she was so relieved, and I felt the love flow from her being into mine, strengthening me, as she stroked my back many times, praising me. “Oh, my Bindu! Have you forgiven me at last?” she gushed. I felt terrible, physically and emotionally, and I purred lest I die and she not know how much I loved her. She tried to pick me up but my body hurt in a way that told me I would not be able to breathe at all in her arms, and so I raised my tail and stepped away and looked up into her eyes. She was beaming. I hadn’t the heart to let her see me die.

“You come up to the house and I’ll take you in for some fresh raw milk,” she allowed me to have my way and I remembered the milk she had gotten from our cow, “Hilde”—so sweet and wonderful. I wished I could make it back as I watched her get into the car and drive to the house. I watched her striding, faster than usual, because she limped a lot those days, to get inside. I heard her calling me, but I couldn’t make it all the way. Stumbling into the azalea hedge to rest, I listened, sad, so terribly sad, to hear her call and call and be unable to come to her, now so willing, at last. I always had played hard to get and now I regretted, with all my being, my terrible pride—so foolish a thing over which to lose time with each other. Her voice was full of angst and came from everywhere, and I saw the headlamp’s light many times, but I couldn’t move. The air and its life had nearly quit my form entirely, and I closed my eyes and dreamed of being again in her hair, and it seemed I fell into a dark space, full of shining luster and love. So long as I stayed focused there, I was sad but felt otherwise perfect in a way that transcends entirely what people mean when they say that word. I was perfection.

Days went by. I heard her over and over again looking for me, but I could not rise and, in truth, the insects had begun to take my form apart. I hated wakening to the sensation of being bitten by ants and beetles and flies, so I drifted deep at the edge of life and death until I saw a man approaching. In the lustrous blackness He was like a man on fire, the colored lights that came from his form writhed and whipped like flames lashing the air, and his eyes were like small red suns. He came and stroked me and I felt his love for me and for Cailín.

“Bindu,” he sighed and I felt him pressing his own life energy back into my swollen, ant bite riddled body. “You cannot leave her like this,” he insisted. “I will put my light back into you so you have time together, for she is very weary now of the world—and so she needs you. I need you to comfort her for me,” he explained and my body shivered and vibrated like the fire lights leaping all around him. “I invoke the Will,” he rumbled, his voice full of loving conviction, and then I was not just me, Bindu—but also he who had sent me. I felt him lift me to my feet from within my own form, which felt like I, that is We, were animating a corps. But I knew in that instant I had always been an extension of his love sent into the world for her, so I was really, it appeared, part of her as well – which explained a lot. My mind whirled with the implications as I staggered towards the porch, another two hundred feet from where I had lain, halfway between the gate and the house, for four days.

“Oh my God, Bindu!” Cailín saw me, like a walking zombie-cat. She dropped the feeder scoop, scattering kibble everywhere, and she lifted me into her arms. No reunion could have been more sweet and sad as well, for I knew the man out of whom my life had returned had given me only strength enough to last for as long as Cailín really needed me. But so precious it was for her to take me inside in her arms and she took me to her bed and wept as she wet a towel to make it damp and warm, and she stroked the blood from all the bites from my swollen head and ears and nose. “Sweetheart! My poor Bindu where have you been? You look the wrath of God. …Christ, it’s Sunday! All the vets are closed.” She began to weep in earnest. “Oh thank you, Michael and thank you Father, for bringing my Bindu home. Now, please help me save him!”

***

The next four months were desperately glorious. There was nothing she would not do for me. She gave me her own bottled water, which was absolutely pure, and another bowl of sweet well water in case I wanted the minerals. She brought me the best canned cat foods but she mostly fed me her tuna and fresh raw cow’s milk. As the days went by, my body’s strength returned, and my face and ears and nose, all swollen so badly I could barely open my eyes, went back to normal size. She bought me a new litter box, all my own, and I slept on my own pillow, next to hers, with my face in her hair. Once she was sure the flea treatment wouldn’t kill me, she treated me for fleas every week until there were no bugs anywhere on me. Well, not outside but, inside, I was riddled with something biting the inside of my heart, and I felt them wriggling in my form. I recognized them as the same creatures that had killed me before, but I never knew for sure how they’d gotten inside of me. Still, I should tell you, it happened outside the house. There was something in the flying insects that came at night, something in their bite when they poked us with their long mouth needles, that got inside and killed us slowly—and it’s a very creepy feeling—not a pleasant way to die at all, as I am sure you could imagine if you but gave it thought.

Oh, how I enjoyed being clean and in her bed, breathing again her scent and enjoying her affection! I never played hard to get anymore but I did stare longingly at the little bird she kept up high, hanging from the ceiling, whom she called “Chicken-man”. I enjoyed vexing her now and again too, because a little mischief made her more sure I would live. So, when I wasn’t rubbing against her legs as if to make her stumble, I stared at the bird until she protested, or I tugged on the rim of my water bowl to watch the water splash. When she fussed, I would stand regally and raise my tail, smiling, and I would look into her eyes and then close and blink slowly as I held her gaze. It’s a cat’s way of flirting and she came to call it “kitty eye kisses”, which I thought appropriate as it was like blowing kissing the way humans do. I was blown away when she started doing kitty eye kisses back at me and a whole new level of communicating at a distance began between us.

When we lay in bed at night, watching the color picture box, I stared at her, making kitty eye kisses, and staring at the color picture box, and I put my paw in her hand just to be close. I could feel how happy it made her and I liked very much the way she gently fingered my toes. The fiery joy of her being and mine coursed between us. She didn’t know I was sick. She thought I had just “calmed down”. I was amazed to find I understood her words and even heard her thoughts. I always had, but it had never so astounded me – the clarity of the insights it created for me. She had thought me, thought us all, “merely cats” but I will tell you now that no cat is ever “merely a cat”. We are earnestly cosmic intelligences with rudimentary reasoning and yet with understanding that transcends humanity’s linear thought which they, foolishly, consider “true reason”. We know, for instance, that what humans call “death” is no big deal at all. We can never be a part from what we are a part of after all and, if the human will open to it, every cat that comes intimately into the human’s life can serve a unique purpose for which we have made that very appearance. It’s the same for all life forms. The whole world is one giant machine—one life, and it sends parts of its being here and there, crossing paths and joining destinies, as a way of nurturing all of its extensions. So, even though I knew I would not live much longer, I had no doubt I would be back—and at just the right time.

Her spirits improved but her physical pain did not. It grew worse. When she came in from work at night the right side of her body looked like the man’s in the lustrous deep. Fire scintillated from her right leg from her ankle to her hip, and she moved with so much obvious pain, grimacing and limping. The light of her being rose when she saw me and, when we touched, especially when I went out of my way to make touching happen, she fair glowed with the joy it gave her—so grateful just to have me close. I was very concerned for her because I could tell there was something not quite right about the distribution of life light in her body and her head seem to crackle with flames as though the man in the lustrous deep were touching her. In truth, he was always near her. She felt, but could not see, him as I did. She spoke and walked around in her sleep and she often twitched. When she did this too long, I climbed onto her chest and licked her face to waken her. She would come around and stroke my back, and I would lay beside her again with my paw in her hand or my face near hers, breathing her sweet breath. We loved each other very much and, the day I knew I was dying again, I wished she had not found me so soon. We’d had a long, sweet goodbye and I was so sad that it ended in so much emotional trauma for her as she worked so hard in vain to “save” me. I knew, after all, that somehow, I would be back. He would come again into the world, as me, to be her sweetest love in this life. And that was my sacred purpose. It was my personal contribution to the one life of which we are all parts.

I stayed near her for three days and nights, following her around the house and, as she hovered between waking and dreams each night, I leapt onto the bed and walked towards her. I was at first surprised that she felt me, but then it made sense because she was not in the world when she was nearly asleep. I lay down beside her as she raised her head and called my name and, when she wept for missing me, I tried to lick her face, but she could not feel it when she was awake. I thought it funny and sad that people were less sentient when they thought themselves “awake” than when they slept, lingering between the realms near the lustrous abyss. I too slept, in a manner of speaking, to follow her into her dreams. On the fourth morning it all began again.

***

She had been writing once more of Levi when he came to her, pressing into her mindspace with such determination that she reconsidered again entirely the nature of what humans quaintly call “reality”. He was tender but, as Levi, who was a character she had thought she’d invented, he admonished her for failing to tend to her health—to feed herself properly. He reasoned with her, asking why she appeared to be attempting to “neglect her form to death. Had she forgotten her mission, or was she giving up?” He knew just the words because she was a fierce soul and had never been able to give up on anything she had undertaken. She had, instead, to be defeated by it and now, she was feeling defeated by the world and life in it. She was wanting it to end.

I was astonished to feel her through him, to feel her retreat to her bed to speak with him who had sent me into her world. She told him what he already knew—of how she missed me and felt responsible for my death—how she could not forget the way I cried out in suffering as she tried to hold me in the form that was just a corps already. He stayed with her as she wept and fell into dreams, holding her at the edge of the lustrous deep where he gave her a dream of me and where to find me.

She saw my face, up close, as I gazed into her eyes and her heart bounded like our cow Hilde had bounded from her stall into the sweet grass each day—with the joy of life springing forth in what she called “the second spring”. It filled her with joy to see me and to examine how my markings should appear on my face and legs and feet, which I showed her. Then I showed her myself at her friend Kari’s feet and Cailín knew I was with a friend of Kari’s. Then I showed her my back legs, with tall white boots and long bootstraps that ran well up the legs. She wakened in between the realms, in Levi’s arms, having an experience her doctor had told her was a form of sleeping hallucination. She could not move at first because he is strong and, when he holds her in his embrace she is like the tiny birds were in my thrall, so overwhelmed, but for her it was a joy and a delight. Then his visage too dissipated and movement returned to her form.

Cailín rose at once and sent messages to Kari, describing me and telling Kari I was with a friend of hers and Cailín knew not who it would be. I seemed to but waken from a dream and found myself with another feline mother and two sisters. I recognized one of them at once as Maya, who had been my mother previously, and I was pleased to realize we were coming back to her together. The woman, Cailín’s friend, Kari, had the most amazing animal energies around her and I was not surprised when I heard her voice through the wall of the bathroom. She did not know we were there and our feline mother willed us to be silent and so we were very still. By and by, mother left to find food and something must have happened because she never came back.

Four days went by and, desperate, I began to scream. I screamed to be found lest we all die, for my sisters, who were not as strong as I, were failing—and so I screamed. I screamed and screamed until my head hurt and there was not enough air in the tiny space. Something had changed and it blocked out my mother along with the air.

***

“Hey! Don’t cry, and don’t freak out. I don’t want you to seize. Look what I found!”

Cailín read the message from Kari and nearly fainted. She began to laugh and weep all at once but, as she wept, she saw him again in her mindspace and she knew all her suffering had been for naught because he had done as he’d promised and brought me back to her. A picture appeared on the screen of Cailín’s talking box and she saw Kari’s hand holding me up so the long bootstraps that ran up my back boots shown clearly where my legs drooped down her arm.

“OMG! Kari, that’s him!”

“I know it is, you little witch! You told me he’d look just like this! It’s crazy! We had to cut a hole in the wall of David’s bathroom to get them out!”

“Tell him I owe him a bottle of LaPhroaig! I see you are in the truck. Where are you headed?” Cailín giggled and tears striped her cheeks as she tapped messages into the talking box.

“I’m taking them to the vet to get them hydrated. David covered the hole he saw their mother come out of four days ago.”

“That was when I had the dream of him!” Cailín told Kari, and her heart bounded in her chest. Kari too was happy, so pleased to bring us back together.

“I know! I knew it was your Bindu when I heard him in there. I’ll let you know when I get out of the vet’s office how things are. You sit tight.”

“Roger that. Thank you, Kari! Thank you, David!” Cailín gushed and jumped into clothes to fetch a bottle of Scotch from the store for David.

***

The animal doctor’s office had a scent I recognized as having many layers. Some were of illness and some were of animals still there and some long gone. I smelled too the tears people had shed when they’d lost their animal helpers. I was glad we did not stay there long. Kari and the doctor made sure we had the fluids we needed and my hunger and thirst went away even though they fed us not at all. Kari snuggled us into the shadows of a warm carrier and took us away.

The trembling of the truck engine stopped and I heard the voices of familiar dogs and birds. My heart bounded as I realized I was home! Cailín met Kari at the door and they hugged and, of course, Cailín began to weep with joy. When she reached in and her warm hands closed around me, I thought I might die with the ecstasy of our energies colliding and mixing again. She held me to her chest over her heart and I felt it beating. When she held me away she looked into my eyes and I stared serenely back at her and then made a slow blink “kitty kiss” with my eyes. She laughed and wept and held me against her chest again while she and Kari talked and I purred so she would know it was me. Then Cailín began to feed me. She really wanted me to eat a lot, but I wasn’t hungry again yet. Still, I ate for her and she was put at ease. She didn’t want to set me back in the carrier to feed my sisters, so I purred more loudly while she did, so she would know I was happy to be home. After a little while, everyone was fed and Kari hugged her and Cailín thanked her and they laughed and told each other how much they loved each other. Then the most wonderful thing happened.

Cailín took us all into the bathroom where she had made a bed for us in the tub and, at the other end, she had put in a shallow litter tray. Once my sisters were settled and sleeping, while I was hovering at the edge of dreams, I felt Cailín’s hands close around me. She lifted me to her chest over her heart and carried me to the bedroom where the scents of my last life were still heavy in the air and I remembered it all. Then she put a pillow between her pillow and the headboard and lay down, and the sweet scent of her hair enveloped me as she settled me on the top of her head. I purred and purred as she kept her right hand on me, making biscuits in her hair, and I fell deep into dreams with her, enjoying the fount of her energy, springing from the top of her head and merging again with my own. The sweetest joy fell over me, peaceful and yet rampant, as I realized we had never really been apart at all. We cannot be apart from what we are a part of. It is impossible to lose what we love.