16 August 2017 "On Bob's Last Day"

On Bob’s last day, I took him to the vet for an abscess on his mouth that wasn’t healing with antibiotics. I had been dreading hearing bad news all day, but to finally hear the words from the vet’s mouth, that it might be time to consider putting him down, was crushing. I still remember the weight of his warm little body on my lap, the way his hair shed all over my white tee shirt with the alien patch on it, and how uncomfortably warm and wet my phone got when I pressed it to my cheeks as I cried to Max on the phone. I knew how comfortable he was lying in my lap, and I know he would have stayed there forever if he could have.

My mom and I left I think both knowing and not knowing that this goodbye was the last one. We didn’t have to deal with the pain of putting him down, but we did have to deal with the pain of coming home to a house full of old rawhide bones, a giant cylinder of dog joint supplements, and a water bowl that now felt painfully big for just two cats.

It’s such an odd time in my life. I’ve never not had a dog, I’ve never felt so secure in a relationship, and yet I’ve never been so utterly on my own to plan my future. Losing Bob is something I both was and wasn’t ready for, and in two weeks in San Francisco I’ve made more money than I did in a whole summer of babysitting on a perfect schedule with my aunt Karen. I miss Max in a way that feels more palpable than how much I miss my mom, and sometimes I can feel how empty life becomes when you realize that maybe the people you so easily thought you could replace are special in their own right after all.

I’ve never felt I have so much potential as I do now, but I also have never felt so drawn back to the past in a way that I wonder about the true nature of my happiness. We all have a hundred paths we could follow to achieve happiness in a hundred ways, but it’s a matter of figuring out which type we want and how we can make happiness last. I could be happy marrying Max and following him around for a while, I could be happy moving home and adopting a dog, I could be happy never leaving California. I could be happy moving into a van or tiny house for a few years and figuring out a little more about wide open spaces, I could be happy finally going back and backpacking Africathecontinent the way I wanted to so desperately when I stayed in hostels in South Africa. I could surf in Costa Rica and find a happiness in that special kind of sand they have there, picking bugs off my arms and drinking things fresher than I’d find in the very first Whole Foods in Berkeley.

I don’t know the best way to be happy. I want everything and just some things all the time and it’s so confusing to know that I’m in love with Max but I’m also in love with myself. I love seeing city lights but I hate the idea of smog. I want to combine as many pictures in my mind as I can, and I never want to feel like I settled for seeing less of this world than I imagined when I was in high school and went to Paris and fell in love with the way that wine was served to young people in glasses and how everyone wore Doc Martens just to wait in line to get tickets for a train.