Eye Level

​He knows when I am sad

before I do.

I don’t know how.

Maybe it’s the way I come through the door,

or something in the air around me

that I can’t smell but he can.

He just comes and puts his head

on whatever part of me is closest

and stays there,

heavy and warm,

until feeling changes.

Nobody else does that.

We lie here most afternoons,

his paw across my arm like he forgot it,

like it landed there by accident

and neither of us moved.

I whisper things to him

I wouldn’t say out loud —

not secrets exactly,

just the true version of things.

He doesn’t tell anyone.

He doesn’t look at me differently after.

He just blinks his slow blink

and breathes.

I think he knows about the dream I have sometimes.

The one I don’t tell Mum.

Where he is very still

and I am calling him

and he doesn’t come.

I always wake up

and put my hand on his side

just to feel it rise and fall.

He is always there.

So far, he is always there.

The vet said he is healthy.

I heard them say it.

But I also heard the word years

used in a way that made me

count quietly on my fingers

and then stop counting.

I don’t think about it for long.

You can’t, not really,

when he is right here

smelling of outside and himself,

when he is chewing the corner of something

he absolutely should not have,

when he runs at the field

like running is the whole point of having a body.

He taught me that, I think.

To be where I am.

I am still learning most things.

What is fair. What is kind.

When to speak and when to just be there.

He already knows all of it.

He has always known.

I watch him sleep sometimes,

his legs moving slightly,

chasing something in a dream,

and I think:

he has his own life inside him

that I will never see.

That used to make me sad.

Now I think it’s just true,

and true things don’t have to be sad,

they just have to be respected.

Mum says I’m growing up.

I think this is part of it —

learning that the ones you love

have whole worlds

you cannot follow them into,

and loving them anyway,

completely,

without needing to go everywhere they go.

He is waking up now.

He stretches so hard his whole body shakes.

He looks at me.

Let’s go, his eyes say.

I don’t know where.

It doesn’t matter.

I get up.

I always get up.