I hate time…the way time moves forward while you are frozen inside of it; the rest of the world never having stopped. Whatever you were just looking at has been behind you. You’re stuck and no one can see, and it shouldn’t matter anyway. If we were all personally consumed with each other’s pain, nobody would be able to move. A stagnant society suspended in a spider web with the predator at our feet that we cannot see, because we are not looking forward. As long as you’re alive, the only thing that’s yours for certain, is the present, and what you choose to do with it.

Over a decade ago I lost a friend to the ground that I will never reconcile. No amount of time could compensate. At 19, there is a vague understanding that all humans must die at some point, but not so young…except that some of us do.

Time works hand in hand with death to chip away at everything we cling to in the aftermath. Faces blur and memories warp into what we want them to be. The departed are either immortalized of vilified, depending on their lasting impression.  Either way, forgetting anything concrete becomes synonymous with “moving on,” which seems like something you shouldn’t be able to do if you ever cared at all.

As his death started to sink in, a dark tunnel had formed in front of me, and I came to the conclusion that avoiding that darkness would be avoiding what happened, and so I stepped in to face it, and come out the other side with an understanding of grief and death. That was ridiculous, and the only thing I learned from being in the darkness for ten years was how bright the light can be once you finally let yourself out see it. And the only thing that bolted that reality into me was another shattering loss. A literal light of white fur and brown ears who vanished into ash in a tin that I still can only acknowledge out of the corner of my eye.

The profile I came across on Petfinder had her cleaned up for a professional photo, complete with a pink paisley bandana around her neck. Yes, she was adorable, but it was something in her eyes that grabbed on to me. They were wide, and beyond sadness and fear. It was a look of defeat, demanding directly, “what will happen to me?”
I have a picture of her the day after I brought her home, laying next to me and looking at me with different eyes, and I never again saw that look of desperation and despair. Everything she had endured before was gone, and her life began again, and so did mine.

I am left behind now, and when I look in the mirror I know what my dark eyes are saying. I also spent the last three and a half years watching this little dog living in the present, and loving every second after she began again with me. She taught me how to move forward, and I didn’t even realize it until I needed to know how.

Luciana, 30