I Grieve For A Dog Who Can’t.

I grieve for a dog that can’t —

… whose hippocampus and heart were so indelibly shaped by the sounds of a boat engine and sight of a motorcycle that his nervous system is now primed to believe every motorbike and every speedboat to be new possibility of his original dad coming to get him.

It isn’t, though — and it never will be.

And his guttural, soul-wrenching cries as the engines inevitably whine away without him will forever be a wound I’m unable to heal.

Hope is an eternal wellspring, all right — a damned poisonous one.

We share that raw wound, though. I know it well.

I know that it reopens, freshly torn and gruesome as the first tear, with every rising ‘chance’… I feel it in myself all too frequently.

I recognize his quickened, pitter-patter footsteps as he dances around me, searching for the source of the sound that’s ringing through his ears and heart, pinging along every knife-sharp edge of longing — it never dulls.

I’ve built an image of what that unknown man might’ve looked like fro…