I have been saving the smell of the waiting room all afternoon: disinfectant with a ghost of wet fur under it, and the small squeak of your shoe on the tile every time the door buzzes and it isn't your name. That squeak I will keep. Around two a.m.
it will become a bird you cannot see, and you will follow it down a hallway that is also the carrier you are holding, and none of this will strike you as odd.
The cat, the trembling weight of him pressed into the crook of your arm, his heartbeat going faster than yours: I am taking that heartbeat whole. Later it will belong to a clock with no numbers, and you will be winding it, and the winding will feel like petting, and he will be enormous, the size of a warm hill, unafraid, purring in a language you finally understand.
You held his paw in the fluorescent hum and did not say the thing you were afraid of. I heard it anyway. I always hear the sentence left in the throat. So I am building a version where the vet is a lighthouse keeper, kind, unhurried, and the waiting room opens onto a field, and the word "biopsy" is just a small blue stone you set down at the door on your way out.
You wanted more time in the chair. I cannot give you more of that day. But I can give you a long soft night where he leans into your hand and stays leaning, where nothing has to be decided, where the clock winds down instead of up.
By the toaster's click I will be gone, and you will keep only a warm unaccountable ache and the urge to hold him closer. Take it.
It was the whole reason I came.