At a drainage outlet on a stormy night, three-month-old me met Lin Wan, who leaned on a white cane. Her fingertips, scented with mint, hovered three centimeters from my nose, like moonlight too fragile to touch. That was the beginning of the darkness we shared.
She wrote “protect” on my back in Braille, and I swept moonlight across the back of her hand with my tail. The warmth still lingered on my head after she tapped me for stealing a shrimp while eggs sizzled in the kitchen. When the bath mat slipped in the bathroom, I shoved open the door, and cries for help poured through the gap. Beside the pottery studio’s wheel, her clay-smeared fingertips and my muddy paw pads left matching impressions in the moonlight.
When her pupils could finally catch blurry shapes of light, the pothos on the windowsill was already climbing along my paw prints. But my breathing grew as faint as falling snow. I could no longer hold on long enough to see her draw its full outline.
Those paw prints in the moonlight were the Braille I wrote to the world, and the clearest coordinates in her darkness. So every encounter is a mutual salvation. She gave me a home, and I spent my whole life paving her way toward the light.
