Bella bella bella

She was handed to me like a baby. She was placed in my arms as if she already belonged there, careful and deliberate.

'Are you even mine?' I'm whispering to her softly. She doesn't so much as even look away from me. She just stares blankly past my shoulder. She barely moves if I have her in my hands. So, I kiss her on her little face. I kiss her and kiss her over and over. Her teeny tiny body fits in my hands like a football. She wriggles wriggles wriggles.

I was experiencing a new, tender kind of love. “Unconditional,” people said. It didn’t feel like the right word. It was smaller and closer than that... something you did with your hands. It was feeding and watching, and the quiet pull of being needed. I gave her what I could... routine, warmth, a place to rest. And she gave something back that was harder to name. Not joy exactly, but a steadiness. A reason to get up and keep moving.

She was mine. I was hers.

Days would pass and other things fell away. My questions about love, the ache of loneliness, the ups and downs of grief. I stopped turning them over and instead looked to her, eyes like dinner plates.

Now, she curls herself into a small donut shape as we ready ourselves for bed. She burrows into the bed, under the covers. I take one look at her and melt. She is mine. I am worried someone is going to come and take her from me. I don't have any papers. I don't know where she has come from, or who she is. I am hoping she is truly mine. I don't know what I would do if she were taken from me.

She follows me at my ankles, never leaving my side. She stays with me. She is with me when I sleep and when I wake. She kisses me on the face when I say, 'good morning'. She is unlike anything I have had in my life before. She is low-slung and resolute, she pads across the kitchen tiles like a tiny, furred tank. Her eyes full of tragic wisdom, as if she’s seen the worst of human folly and still forgives us.

She barks, barks, barks. Sharp, insistent. People hate it. She stands in front of me, small but certain, her body drawn small and tight with purpose. When someone comes to collect something, she moves between us, a low warning in her throat: that’s close enough.

She’s there at night too, when the street empties and footsteps carry in darkness. When a man pauses too long near the table. I feel her before I see her... a little growl, alert, steady, watching.

We fall into it together, the two of us, a pair that belongs together. She recognises her role without me saying a thing. Mostly, though, it’s simpler than that. We just go where we need to go, a life in two.