Is it the way a cat’s fur catches the light,
so soft, so fragile, the edges of its whiskers trembling like the last moment before dawn?
Is it the slant of a dog’s ears, how they flick in synchrony with a thousand unspoken thoughts,
or the way a bird’s wing arcs, a perfect geometry drawn by the air itself?
These small, delicate patterns, do they make us love them more?
Do they lend us the illusion that the beauty we seek in the world
is somehow captured in the curves of an animal's form?
I wonder, are we entranced by their grace because we long for something we can never hold?
Something untouchable, free, yet bound to us by this strange, deep affection.
Why is it that we cannot love them without also wanting their beauty to be unblemished,
untouched by time’s cruel hand or the world’s harsh gaze?
Are we looking for a mirror,
one that shows us not just the innocence we lost long ago,
but the innocence we keep trying to protect,
to hold against the tide of all that is broken in us?
Perhaps it is the way a rabbit’s eyes reflect the light of the moon,
round and full of questions we can never answer,
or how the slow, deliberate steps of a tortoise remind us
of the weight of time itself,
how it can be both a burden and a blessing.
Why do we love these creatures as if they are eternal
as if their very existence offers us a way to deny our mortality?
But maybe it’s the rawness of it all, the way love for an animal
often begins in the simplest, most humble of ways.
A small act, a brush of fur against a palm,
a tail that wags when you are at your loneliest.
They offer us nothing but themselves,
and we, in return, give them our broken pieces,
those scraps of our souls we don’t know what to do with.
We try to repair what is shattered,
but there’s no promise of success. Only love,
in its purest, most painful form.
But still, we ask: why must there be an aesthetic?
Why does our love for them wear this heavy veil of expectation,
as if their value lies not only in their presence,
but in the ways they make our eyes catch the light,
in the way their movements, so naturally, so effortlessly
mirror the beauty we crave?
I remember the first time I held a kitten in my arms.
Its tiny heartbeat, so rapid, so fragile,
and how I thought for just a second that I could protect it from the whole world.
But the kitten looked at me, and I knew,
it had never needed protection. It was the world itself,
wrapped in soft, silken fur, untouched by human hands.
Yet there, at that moment, I wanted to make it mine,
to cage that beauty so I could keep it forever,
to place it inside some perfect frame
so that I could stare at it for eternity.
But no beauty is meant to last forever.
No love is meant to be kept in one moment,
preserved like a forgotten photograph.
Perhaps the aesthetic is not in the creatures themselves,
but in the way we perceive them,
the way we project onto them the most fragile parts of ourselves.
Maybe we only love them because they remind us of the fleeting nature of everything.
Of how everything we hold dear will someday vanish,
and we will be left holding only shadows and the memories of things
we couldn’t save.
And yet, we still love them.
We still love them even when the world tells us
to put them in cages of form,
to shape them into something we can control,
something we can call "beautiful" in the way we understand beauty.
But they are not ours to shape.
They are not ours to hold.
They are the wildness we lost,
the freedom we only glimpse in their eyes.
We watch them, and we see ourselves in them,
but only the version of us we wish we could be:
Untamed, unbroken, unafraid of the passage of time.
Their beauty, their grace,
is not something we can possess.
It is something we can only love
from the distance of our hearts,
from the place where longing blooms
like a flower, we cannot touch.
So, we love them not for their beauty,
but because they make us feel beautiful,
even in our darkest, most broken places.
And perhaps that is the greatest gift of all:
That their love is not conditional.
It doesn’t need to fit a mold,
doesn’t need to adhere to some standard
we invented to justify the things we cannot understand.
They are beautiful because they exist,
because they are creatures of instinct and grace,
of life in its purest form.
And though we can never own them,
though we can never keep them,
they give us the most precious thing we can hold:
the knowledge that beauty
is not always something you can capture.
Sometimes, it is the thing
that captures you.
The way a horse’s mane cascades,
flowing like a river in the wind,
its eyes wide, wise,
and heavy with untold histories.
It knows of the earth beneath its hooves,
of the sky that stretches endlessly above.

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