Tuesday, November 26th, 2013.

It was eight pm on a Tuesday night in november. The sun had set quickly, and the night surrounded the house like a blanket, its' lights yellow and soft in the thick darkness. It had been raining all day, steady and cold. I could see my breath, clouds of vapor that vanished within seconds. It was not an ordinary night, it was less than that- mundane, almost boring. Everything was still, nothing announcing itself but the rain that was slicked against the windows, pouring down, making everything blurry.
The screen door had been closed. He was unattended; we trusted him to come back, like he always did. Time, that whore with an hourglass figure, snatched our attention for a while- short term memory is a curse. Finally, when Time released us from Her clutches, we noticed the silence, the absence of the click click click on hardwood floors, the jangling of tags. The beginnings of panic are minuscule; the beating of the heart quickens its pace just a bit, readying itself for the race that adrenaline brings. Then the pulse points in the wrists and neck and ears begin to throb, begging for your attention. The loud tick tick tick of your heart a drum, a twitching clock.
We set out into the night, keeping all doors open- a vain hope. We searched for him, and called his name like a mantra, a prayer, a spell for him to appear in the darkness, panting and stumbling back to us. Half crying, I staggered up and down the empty streets. The houses, with their dark windows, seemed ominous and made the air seem colder. I imagined ice forming over them, the wood paneling and the painted doors, until they splintered and cracked and gave the sympathy and consolation that I needed, that I begged for in a voice strangled by the winter frost. Our voices were the only ones in the night, and they were thrown back at us, the darkness mimicking our voices, distorted. There was no moon that night, only the false light that we held in plastic containers; Flashlights that revealed nothing but the harsh outlines of trees and their leaves along the sides of the road, which dipped down to touch our faces, as in in condolence. My father's glasses were speckled with either rain or tears, or both- I could not tell. I myself was freely crying. The tears were warm against my cheeks, ruddied by the winter cold.

The silence in the house now is obscenely loud. We cannot hide from it, we cannot drown it in our own cries. I hear the click click click of his paws on the hardwood flooring of the house and the jangling of tags just behind me, but when I turn he is not there. There are indents in the couch, nose prints on the windows. Fourteen years old, half demented, anxious, cataracts in his eyes that made them look misty and clouded, blind. A presence that was overlooked, he was just…there. We treated him like a tree. Something that had roots and would remain forever, becoming grander in age. We knew our tree had its knots, knew it shivered and shaked in the wind and saw the vacant look in the eyes of leaves. But what we forget is that even trees do not last forever. They can become sick, turning their insides rotten until they crack down the middle, revealing their age in their once-magnificent stature. We forget that nature can knock down a tree. We forget and disregard the freak accidents that make trees disappear within the blink of an eye, reducing them to nothing but an irregular patch in the grass.
It is one thing for him to be dead, for that is definite and finite. But he isn't dead. He is missing. He could be dead, but this I do not know, and the lack of knowledge physically pains me. He will always be missing, both from this house and my heart. Its funny- how so peculiarly human their expressions can be, their mannerisms so like ours. How attached we allow ourselves to get to these furry creatures that we claim as our companions. How we revel in the simplicity in these animals, how healing and fulfilling they can be. How quickly they come and go.
As I accept that he is gone, I do not take in a lesson from this- the oversold lessons of appreciating things and the bullshit that follows.Time is a whore and will have her way with you, every time. She will blind you and bind you and make you forget to cherish the things that pass us within the blink of an eye. Instead, the lesson for me is that things come and go. Things, in the broadest sense of the word, fluctuate. Memory lives and when memory dies; it is finite. Missing implies so many things. Missing implies a dying hope. Missing implies an absence, both physical and mental. Missing implies a pain that is being felt, an absence cut from the heart, but never the memory. The pain threatens to consume, and it gnaws on the fringes of memory. But the pain is what keeps the memory alive. And Time, stepping in again, pushing us along the road to an inevitable end, dulls the pain and eases the ache until the memory becomes a scar on the heart where the wound has been sewn. Through this process, we realize that Time is not a whore, not a seducer, but an usher. She wraps us in her blanket and steals us and heals us, and blinds us so we may face death with cataracts in our eyes and a blank mind. She eases the way, confuses us so that we may believe that our lives are much longer than they truly are. For this I thank Time for stealing me on Tuesday, November 26th. Things come and go, this is what Time has taught me, and the most we can do is let them.