a little something: Goddamn Dog

As I was tucking my dog into bed, a thought occurred to me, a dark thought. This dog had known a life before me, before I adopted him from the Humane Society. He had a mother and father out in the world or dead. We had each lived portions of our lives the other would never know. I could tell him about my wild college days and my childhood, my first girlfriend, but would he understand? Would he comprehend? We can communicate with animals; I think one would need to be a sociopath to disagree, but I am willing to admit it is more of a “grey” area when one gets into which sort of concepts a dog would understand and which they would not - and, of course, “communicate” is one thing, but spoken English language is another. Would a dog have an easier time with a slide show? Sure, he’d see the pictures from my elementary school birthday parties, but would he recognize me in them? Would he know why I was showing him these photos? Even if he were to understand the meaning of the photos, it seemed unlikely that he would understand the “why” of the situation - why I was pulling him out of bed moments after tucking him in to show him photos; which is to say that he would not understand my sudden, overwhelming existential dread. Whether or not a dog could conceive of existential dread was a question for another day, the matter at hand was how a dog could possibly read the look on my face of pure panic and know it was not the result of a home invasion or a fire, but of something grander, yet more abstract. For, I must concede, even though I was aware of dread as something that happened to me, surely, in the past, I had not understood what another human was going through while they were experiencing what I was now feeling - and, even worse, while I could recognize this as a short-coming and a mistake in my past, I could not confidently say whether or not I had ever ignored my dog’s feeling of doom. Thus, it was safe to say that an inter-species communication as to the concept of malaise did not exist. It was at that moment that my home suddenly felt very empty and the companionship of my dog no longer comforted me anymore. My stupid dog who didn’t understand me at all, who only loved me because I gave him food, was my only friend in the whole world and he didn’t even understand we were friends.