anniversaries

Two years ago today I held you as we said good-bye so peacefully. Two years ago today, I cried and cried and kissed your long nose. Two years ago today I left the vet’s office without you. Two years ago today everything seemed to shift. I still thought that I saw you out of the corner of my eye. I kept seeing you, in fact. I saw you and smelled you every day for weeks afterward. I didn’t want to vacuum after you were gone and I let the dust and grime accumulate for a month before I relented. I wanted your fur to linger, traces of you in the carpet. Even now I pull out a long-forgotten sweater to find your blonde bits on the sleeve. I think of each day, especially now as I get ready to make another kind of commitment. You were my first, the first someone whom I thought of each day, whom I worried about each afternoon, whom I considered every time I made a decision to be here or there, to travel or to visit a friend. We were rarely apart, you and me. Our best times, of course, were in the woods and there were thousands of them. We also had two glorious winters of cross-country skiing on that lake in Connecticut, the one you fell into in February and cut your paw so deep and so long that you painted the hillside scarlet as we lopped to the car. You sought squirrels, though in nearly twelve years, you only ever caught three and two of them were, well, infirm. But you never lost hope. I liked your determination even as it drove me mad. I liked the way that when you were young, you’d spot a fawn across a meadow and race 300 yards across it with only the vaguest of hopes. I liked that next to chasing animals, I was your favorite thing. But sometimes—and I can admit this now—I felt suffocated by your expectations. And so once you were gone, I realized how much of myself I gave you and how much of myself was now free to give to another. When I marry him next month, I’ll be thinking of you and the kind of commitment you showed me I could make. For that, I’m always thankful.