Bickled Peets

I think I’m doing what I want, without even realizing it. There’s undoubtedly been a fluctuation of hesitation as I’ve progressed, but as I fear and worry less, I find I can look back with less avoidance, and more acknowledgement. Something happened, it was, it was most likely necessary to move to the next square on the board and one day I’ll be able to confidently drop “most likely” from my vocabulary and admit wholly that it was indeed.

A dog I’ve had since the late 90s, through my entire military career and then some, had cancer. I’d had to leave her with the man largely responsible for some of my shittier, more self absorbed material, because she was too big to comfortably fit in my vehicle as I fled all of that sadness, and darkness, and destruction. I had no good place to keep her, and believed that leaving her in his care gave him one good thing to try to do right. And he did, as best he could.

But when there are biological things going wrong inside of you, it’s never a sure thing that your best will end in smiles and stars. It is enough to wonder that she lived as long as she did.

They took her in for surgery to remove a growth that she’d had, that ruptured. They took her out, a cancer free spirit/energy source to return to the foundations from which she came. She did not survive. Her journey up; ticket punched.

What made me most unhappy and bitter was not that she was gone, nor even that she was so out of my reach, with no reasonable way to return to her to say goodbye. It was that last summer I had gone back for other reasons, but one of which was to have a satisfactory visit with her, knowing her time was limited by the poison inside her anyway and it resulted in an incredibly short, stressful, visit due to unnecessary drama and posturing.

Yet one more thing I’ll struggle to forgive that woman for.