-

find them. love them.
[mother theresa]

-

My dog bit me today. I got him when I was seventeen and found him locked in a chicken coop in a shady neighborhood, the kind where houses never get sold and men never wear shirts. His water had been knocked over long ago and he was smeared with his own excrement, which would have completely defeated me, but he kept hurling himself against the sagging chicken wire anyway. He was yelping like he knew this was his chance, that the girl in the goofy overalls holding a battered paint can would sympathize with the cards life had dealt him.

I offered his owners twenty bucks, which was all the cash I had on me, but they said, Keep the money, just take him. He won't shut up. He barked nonstop until I tucked his scraggly head under my armpit, lifted his small body to my chest, and when I thought no one else was looking I whispered to him that I would take care of him from now on. He weighed less than the can of paint, and as he shook in my arms I tried to hold him as honestly as possible, communicate my care for him with just my chin resting on his forehead, my thumb between his arms.

He's not really mine anymore. Years later I left, and he stayed with my parents, where I figured he could keep doing what he loved most, patrolling the yard for squirrels and torturing our elderly border collie. When I come home, I start for the back gate where he's waiting and it takes several long minutes for him to recognize my form, my voice. Until then, his growl warbles in his small throat, and he barks at me exactly like the day I found him, like he knows something different is coming and he won't shut up.

Now it's six years later, and today I was snuggling with him when he jacknifed and bit my face so fast it was over before I could be angry or scared. I don't know why he did it, whether one of the other dogs set him off or his age has made him less tolerant of my face up against his, but I was surprised at his teeth, at how sharp they were after years of slick tongue and soft fur and velvety paws. I know nothing of the sharp parts of dogs.

In some bizarre way I'm scared it was because he remembers I left him. As if that was his way of saying, You can go, but I'm not going to remember you if you come back. That's one of my fears deep underneath my skin, that I'm a leaver, that I will be left as a result. I wonder if animals and everything else I love can see that in me, that I might not do the hard thing and stay.

I know this isn't true, that my dog honestly has the long-term memory of a goldfish with head trauma, that he doesn't remember me leaving home any more than I remember being born. Sometimes you just get bit, I told myself, but I still couldn't look him in the eye. I didn't really believe it, any more than I really believe space is a vaccum or that all the wood in a fire turns into ash.

Hours later, he broke out of the kitchen barricade where he was supposed to be sleeping, where my other dog was already twitching and growling deep in her dream. I heard claws ticking on the hardwood floor and his fur brush against my shin, and he settled next to me while I wrote as if it was where he belonged, watching me patiently, silently. Our eyes met, his so tiny and brown, and they said, Forgive me. I forgave you.

I covered his head with my palm, and he settled on the ground with a sigh, just close enough to touch the outside of my foot. He stayed there on the cold flat wood until my sister came and took him back. And I know I will remember this about him when I'm old and he's been gone for decades, these two things. I will remember him teaching me how to love something simply because that's the thing it needs most. And I will remember what the crust over my cheek already knows, this truth simple enough for both he and I to practice, that there is power to erase the mistakes of the past.