The door that no longer exist
Through the paws of a refugee cat, the raw cruelty of war paints the most painful portrait of exile: a heart that keeps searching for home at a door that violence has already erased from the map
With small steps
and a heart too large
for her frail little body,
she crossed the border,
carrying in her eyes
the terror of nights
when the sky came down
and the earth could no longer hold it.
She grew hungry
until her meow
became a whispered prayer.
She was driven from place to place
until she forgot
the shape of her first window,
the scent of the corner
where she once slept safely.
She ran from one sound to the next,
from one fear to another,
as though the whole world
had turned into a rabid dog,
chasing a cat
who wanted nothing
but to stay alive.
She did not reach safety alone.
Inside her,
a heartbeat stirred—
a heartbeat that had never seen war,
yet knew its thunder
through the walls of flesh and blood.
A silent witness
to a history
it had not yet been born into.
Its father, meanwhile,
remained behind.
On the far side of fear,
beneath a sky
that would not stop threatening,
hungry,
homeless,
trembling through the night
like a single leaf
at the mercy of the wind.
Luna did not know
that a border lay between them.
She did not know
the names of wars,
the shape of countries on maps,
or the language of exile.
She knew only this:
a place once called home
was gone.
And whenever her heart
began, little by little,
to grow quiet,
it would turn back,
as though it were still looking
for the cat
the war had left behind.
Waiting
at a door
that no longer exists.
Luna is a genocide survivor