The city brought me new life, because it was just like my old life. It reeked of the way things were before I boarded a ship and turned my back on the shore, and nostalgia carved itself a niche in my chest, heavy and warm with the weight of the past. Absorbed in the lights and sounds and smells, I almost forgot you more than once. I let my heart lead when I still needed my head, if only for a while.
But I wanted to show you something you would enjoy before I brought you somewhere safe. Before I left you in someone else's care. So when the tide rose and the moon was out in full, I took you to the piers, the great wooden bridges that lead to nowhere but the sea.
It was stunning. The wind whipped your fur and the moon cloaked you in a soft halo, which you would have never known before. You raced up the pier with your crooked gait, laughing as the waves sloshed against the supports below. Up there, we were happy, caressed by the rising winds and the dark of night.
But then you stepped on a rotten plank. It creaked, groaned, snapped beneath you with a mighty crack even the stars could hear. You screamed, unless that was me, unless that was both of us, and then you fell, in my sight one moment, gone from it the next.
I may have planned to leave you, but never like this. You were meant to be scooped up by warm hands, to be folded in by soft, lilting voices. To be collared but sheltered for the rest of your days. The sea would not give you these things, though. I plunged through the pier after you.