Sometimes Things Come Back

A few years passed after the nights with the glowing green man. Enough time for the memories to soften at the edges, though they never fully left me. By the time I was seven, life had introduced me to something far more real than fear.

Loss.

Her name was Mandy.

She was my first dog, my shadow, my constant. Black fur so dark it swallowed the light, eyes full of warmth and patience. To me, she wasn’t just a pet she was safety. She was comfort. She was there during quiet afternoons and long nights, during moments when the world felt too big for a kid who didn’t quite understand it yet.

When she died, something inside me broke in a way I didn’t have words for.

I was devastated. Not sad devastated. It was my first real loss, and it hit with a weight no one prepares a child for. I remember crying until my chest hurt, until my eyes burned, until exhaustion was the only thing that stopped the tears. For weeks afterward, I couldn’t even look at the color black. Anything that reminded me of her fur a jacket, a shoe, a shadow would send me spiraling back into that grief.

I didn’t understand death. I only understood absence.

And absence was unbearable.

One night, not long after she passed, I woke up suddenly. No noise. No nightmare. Just awake.

Moonlight filtered into my room, faint and pale. I was in my tall wooden bed the kind with a dresser built underneath, high enough that climbing down always felt like a small leap. I remember sitting up, rubbing my eyes, and looking down toward the floor.

That’s when I saw her.

Mandy was sitting on my bedroom floor, right below me, looking up. Just like she used to. Her ears were relaxed, her posture calm, her eyes soft and familiar. She looked exactly the way she always had whole, present, real.

I didn’t question it.

I didn’t feel fear.

I jumped down from the bed and wrapped my arms around her, burying my face in her fur and sobbing. I remember the warmth. The solidity of her. The way it felt like everything broken inside me snapped back into place for just a moment.

And then she spoke.

Not with her mouth moving the way humans do but clearly. Gently. In a human voice.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“I love you.”

That was all.

No explanation. No confusion. Just comfort.

The next thing I remember is morning.

Sunlight. Silence.

I woke up on the floor, my pillow and blanket pulled down from my bed, curled near the doorway. The same doorway I used to wake up staring at years earlier the same one where the glowing green man once stood watching me sleep.

Mandy was gone.

There were no paw prints. No signs. Nothing to prove what I’d seen.

But I knew.

I knew what it felt like to hold her. I knew what I heard. And I knew that whatever had comforted me that night was real enough to leave me there on the floor, facing that door as if something had wanted me to remember it.

That was the first time I realized the world wasn’t just divided into what lives and what dies.

Some things leave.

Some things stay.

And some things come back just long enough to say goodbye.