|
i’m starting to get restless. i want to move, more than just jumping up and down and screaming about my current situation. i have this itch beneath my skin that intensifies when i think about the future. this is new. i guess i’m kinda like a turtle in that i’m slow moving and can easily hide from change by burying my head under blankets. i change moods but very rarely location. so this is a new feeling. it’s kinda unsettling, too. i mean, i’ve sort of become accustomed to a slow life with few challenges. so much so that the thought of anything more challenging than a looming SAT sends me into a near-panic-attack. i sorta want to move north. north of the red river. i want to collect conscious memories of other states, both of being and of the united kind. so glad that this itch for change comes right before i finally register for school. so glad that it never caught me before, say, when i needed it. or maybe it did and i was too young and scared to notice it. Welp, it’s done. Fly lived a long 17 some-odd years, mostly spent roaming the five acres in Quinlan, then confined to the back yard on Schmitz, then confined to a room and patio in the city. We buried her today, wrapped in the purple towel I dried her off with after her last bath, in a rut that my uncle carved out of the black Texas clay/sand with his shiny new John Deere tractor. We also buried my cousin’s cat, Token, who died passed roughly at the same time as Fly. Literally; he passed around midnight Thurs/Fri and Fly was gone by 2AM Friday morning. I feel a little better now that she’s buried, especially since we got to take her back out to Quinlan where it all started when mom found her and two fluffy puppies in a ditch in the middle of a hailstorm. I’m gonna miss her There’s so much more to say about her because even though she was “just a dog” she did more for me than most humans in my immediate life. Phew. Time for a swim. (Yes, Tyndis, we have internet AND a swimming pool in Quinlan.) She’s going downhill fast. Faster than I anticipated. So fast that we already plan to bury her in the middle of nowhere under a small copse of trees that she used to spend the summer in the shade of. It’s hard for me to think about digging a hole in the black Texas soil and tossing my companion of over 16 years into it. It makes me feel uncomfortable to think about; then I have to think about the good times and the bad times and how she’ll forever live on in my heart and all that sappy bullshit. It’s only bullshit because I’m angry and later I’m sure I’ll be all over talking about how she’d run and leap through the waving fields of gold and pounced in the snow and nursed all three litters of her puppies like a good ol’ country dog. But for now, I’m angry because I’m sad and sadness is a very offensive emotion to have. In relative terms, she’s lived longer than any other pet. She’s been in my life longer than my best of friends. She’s received more care from me than any other pert of my life. I guess what I’m trying ot say is that when she leaves there’s going to be a gap there. There’s going to be a raw wound the approximate size of a shelty/terrier mix and there’s not going to be anything there to fill it and soothe the ache. I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to lose a living part of my past life in Quinlan, at 710 Schmitz, in highschool, in my awkward teens, in my young 20’s. I don’t want to have to mourn the passing of a living artifact because it also means that part of my life is over. That previous life I spent as a small and frightened child will end and I’ll have to continue on to Part 2: Responsibility Boogaloo.
Bottom line is I’m going to miss her and it’s not fair. You may think the better half of a lifetime is enough but it’s not. It’s really, really not. 
|
