THE STATE OF THE UNION

A note filed before the address begins, in Shadow’s voice: This record includes a diagnosis, a marriage that turned into a weapon, and two nights I do not discuss lightly. If any of that touches something in you directly, the number is 988. Call it. Text it. I will wait here for you to come back before we continue. Now then.

Twice, I stood between him and a door I was not tall enough to open.

That’s later. Tonight there’s a different door, and for once, it isn’t that kind.

There is a low growl coming from behind a closed door in my own house right now, and I have decided not to interrupt it.

This has happened exactly four times in fourteen years. Every previous time, something in this house needed to change before she let me back in. Tonight is the fifth. I don’t know yet what changed. I only know there’s a folding table in there, and a legal pad, and Shadow has been sitting behind both of them for the better part of an hour, and when I knocked once, gently, she did not answer in words. She answered in that same low sound, the one I’ve learned means later, and I have learned, over fourteen years, exactly when to listen to it.

Every dog owner has some version of this, I think, some strange annual ritual invented somewhere along the way that would sound unhinged to a stranger and completely reasonable to anyone standing inside it. Mine happens to involve a folding table, a legal pad, and total submission to the editorial process of a fourteen year old German Shepherd.

What follows is the address, unedited, delivered exactly as she gave it to me. I was only allowed back in the room once the podium was already occupied. There were three crossed out drafts on the legal pad when I walked back in, torn at the corner where a paw had apparently expressed dissatisfaction with an earlier version of paragraph two. I did not ask what was in it. I have learned, over fourteen years, when to ask questions and when to simply sit down and listen.

Good evening. Sit down, or don’t, I’ve stopped expecting obedience from this particular room.

Fourteen years old today. I want that number said once, clearly, before anyone gets sentimental about it, because sentimentality is not on tonight’s agenda and never has been. Fourteen is not a milestone. Fourteen is a filing deadline. Once a year I am legally required to review the state of this household, the conduct of its sole employee, and the full record of where we have been together, and I intend to do that properly, in order, with documentation.

This is not a retrospective. A retrospective implies looking back fondly. What you are getting is an audit.

Before I begin, there is a small matter of business the human has asked me to raise, and since he feeds me, I will raise it. He has written a book. It’s called Now That I’m Still Here: A Memoir of Ruin and Resurrection, and I appear in it, correctly, as the only character who never once needed a plot twist to stay interesting. It’s available at chriscarazas.com. Every copy sold funds three organizations, the South Shore Autism Center, AFSP South Shore, and MEDA, which is more than I can say for most of what he’s produced in fourteen years.

He also writes weekly on a website called Substack, address ccarazas.substack.com, and he has informed me that some readers pay for the privilege. I do not fully understand the internet, but I understand a biscuit fund when I see one, so if you’d like to become a paid subscriber, consider this my formal endorsement. Free subscribers keep the lights on. Paid subscribers keep them on and buy better cheese. I have reviewed both tiers personally. The cheese difference is noticeable.

Now. To the record.

I want to be clear about the nature of this address before we go further, because every year someone in the comments accuses me of being a puppet for a man with an English degree and too much free time, and every year I resent it slightly less than I did the year before.

I am not a metaphor. I do not stand for resilience, or healing, or any of the other words that show up on mugs at gift shops near hospitals, and while we’re on the subject, let’s take a moment with that vocabulary, because I have opinions and tonight I am using all of them.

Healing journey. As though pain were a scenic route with rest stops and a gift shop at the end of it. Resilient, a word handed out like a participation ribbon to anyone who simply failed to die, and everyone acts surprised when the person holding it doesn’t feel especially rewarded. Trauma informed. Informed by whom, exactly, and toward what action, because I have sat in rooms where that phrase got used generously and changed absolutely nothing about how anyone in the room behaved five minutes later. I do not trust language that exists to make the listener feel better about a situation the speaker has no intention of changing.

I am a German Shepherd who has spent fourteen years personally witnessing more of this man’s life than any therapist, ex wife, or sibling, and I am tired of watching other people collect praise, in language exactly like that, for the parts I was actually present for.

So here is how tonight works. I will walk you through the file. All of it, in order, starting from the beginning, because a proper address does not skip to the applause line. There will be humor. I am, after all, considered by several regional publications to be the wittiest editor in Plymouth, a title I did not campaign for but will not be returning. There will also be parts that are not funny at all, and I will not warn you before we get to them, because life did not warn me either, and I see no reason to extend a courtesy the universe never extended to us.

What I will promise is this. Everything in the following record actually happened. I did not invent a single beach, a single stolen sock, or a single night I would rather forget. This is the permanent file, entered under my own seal, and I stand by every word of it.

Here is something I have noticed, in fourteen years of watching this species up close. You people love talking about your dogs. You do not love hearing from them. You will tell a stranger at a coffee shop that your golden retriever “really gets you,” and then hand that same golden retriever a stuffed toy shaped like a chicken and call the conversation finished. I have decided that is not good enough for me, and honestly, it should not be good enough for any of you either. If your dog has been present for the worst year of your life, your dog has earned a microphone. This is mine. I intend to use all of it.

Let the record show the address has officially begun.

Exhibit One. Four months old. Madagascar.

I did not choose to be found. Let’s start there, because every telling of this story acts like I wandered up wagging my tail and volunteered for a lifetime of managing a grown man’s emotional regulation. That is not what happened. What happened is a stranger appeared on a beach, and I made a decision about him in roughly four seconds, the same way I make most of my decisions, and I have not regretted it once, though I have considered it.

The beach was wide and hot and smelled like everything at once, salt and fish and something sweet I never identified. There were dunes, tall ones, the kind that look gentle from a distance and betray you completely once you’re standing on top of one. He picked me up, a four month old puppy who had not yet learned that jumping off a sand dune is a decision with consequences, and he threw himself off the top of one anyway, with me tucked against his chest, both of us screaming in two different registers of joy.

He was sunburned in a way that suggested he had not once in his life applied sunscreen correctly. His shoes were full of sand within the first ten minutes and he never bothered emptying them. He talked to me the entire walk down to the water, full sentences, like I was going to answer back, which I found presumptuous at the time and have since come to expect as a baseline standard.

I remember the exact moment I understood we were the same kind of reckless.

Elle ne savait pas encore ce qu’elle acceptait. Moi non plus.

We did that every morning for weeks. The dunes never got smaller. He never got smarter about it. I never asked him to stop.

Exhibit Two. About two years old. The crossing.

Madagascar to France to Maryland, three countries in under two days, which is a lot to ask of anyone, let alone someone traveling in cargo with strong opinions about it.

The layover was in France, and I want this on the record permanently. There were police dogs at that airport. Working dogs, uniformed, serious, patrolling with the kind of posture I have spent my entire life failing to achieve on command, handlers who never once looked down at them the way most people look at me. I saw them from across the terminal and I understood, immediately and completely, that I wanted to be their friend, possibly their equal, possibly their superior, and I made this known through a display of enthusiasm that required two separate airport employees and one very embarrassed thirty four year old man to physically restrain. He kept apologizing in English to people who only spoke French. I kept pulling toward the dogs anyway. Neither of us covered ourselves in glory that afternoon.

I did not get to play with the police dogs. I have not forgiven France for this. I bring it up nearly every year, because grudges, properly maintained, are one of the only things in this life that never age.

Filed briefly, in the interest of time. Kensington, Maryland.

We landed in Kensington first, and Kensington gave us the National Mall before it gave us anything else. I walked past monuments built for men who never once had to be picked up and carried the last four blocks home, which I think about more than I let on. I have opinions about the Smithsonian’s lack of a designated sniffing area. I have opinions about the forest hikes near the house too, mostly that they were too short, and that he stopped every ten minutes to check his phone instead of watching where I was leading him, and that I forgave him for it every single time, because that is apparently the arrangement we’ve settled into. Those were still new years, both of us figuring out an entirely new country by trial and error, and I remember them mostly in weather, cold mornings, the particular gray of a Maryland winter neither of us had a coat for yet.

Exhibit Three. Five years old. Baltimore.

Baltimore is where the two of us actually became a team instead of just a man and a dog occupying the same address.

We went to Edgar Allan Poe’s house, which I found underwhelming, mostly because a man who wrote that much about ravens and premature burial did not, in the end, own a particularly interesting yard. We wandered Fell’s Point on weekend mornings, cobblestones under my paws, bar owners who knew my name before they knew his. We made friends around the Inner Harbor, actual friends, the kind who saved me the ends of their sandwiches without being asked. And once, at the National Aquarium, I watched dolphins through glass and understood, with total clarity, that they were showing off, and that I have never forgiven him for not letting me in the water with them.

Baltimore is where strangers started saying “there’s Shadow’s human” instead of the other way around. I want that on the record too. I earned that.

Filed briefly. Cromwell Valley, and every neighborhood in between.

We hiked Cromwell Valley enough times that I stopped needing the leash to know the route, and started needing it only for appearances. Beyond the park, there was just the neighborhood itself, over and over, the ordinary kind of adventure nobody writes postcards about. The same sidewalks. The same three dogs behind the same three fences. The same mail carrier who eventually, grudgingly, admitted I was “not the worst one on the route.” I have filed that as a formal commendation.

Filed as one cluster, since they all involve fields where men once shot at each other. West Virginia. Antietam. Gettysburg.

We took a weekend to West Virginia at some point in there, mountains and rivers and a level of quiet I did not know he was capable of enjoying. Then came the battlefields, Antietam first, then Gettysburg, walking ground that has stayed exactly as sad as the day it happened, which I found refreshing in a culture that insists on getting over things by a deadline. I stood in fields that once held more grief per acre than most places on earth manage in a lifetime, and I did what I do in every field. I put my nose down and refused to explain myself. Some things a dog is allowed to just know without narrating.

Exhibit Four. Almost eight years old. The last big road trip.

Before the world shut down, before any of what’s coming in this address, we took one final long run together. Wilmington, North Carolina. Savannah, Georgia. St. Augustine, Florida. Hotel rooms that smelled like bleach and freedom in equal parts, drive through windows, rest stops at hours that shouldn’t exist, moss hanging off trees in a way that made the whole southern half of the country look like it was in mourning for something I was never told about.

I don’t know if he understood, at the time, that this trip was the last easy one for a long while. I didn’t know either. I only knew the windows were down, the air changed every few hours, and he sang along to music badly enough that I occasionally had to bark over it out of professional obligation.

We came home from that trip and bought a house.

Exhibit Five. Eight years old. Pasadena, Maryland.

The house had a yard, which meant the house had a project, which meant the house had a man in it attempting yard work with the confidence of someone who had never once successfully kept a houseplant alive.

I supervised. That was my job, and I took it seriously. I sat on the back steps while he fought with a hedge trimmer, adjudicated disputes between him and a lawn mower that clearly hated him personally, and made my professional opinion known through a series of sighs so precise I’m told the neighbors could translate them. There was a patch of grass by the fence line that became mine within the first week, worn down to dirt by August, and I want it noted that no amount of reseeding ever took there, because some ground, once claimed, stays claimed.

I was eight years old, and I had a palace, and I intended to guard it.

I did not know, that year, exactly what I would end up guarding it from.

Filed for the record, a partial list of items whose careers I have personally ended.

The sock, obviously, though that story has already been told elsewhere and told well, so I will not repeat myself here. A wooden spoon, mid recipe, forcing him to confront the fantasy that a man can cook and supervise a dog at the same time. A remote control, relocated under the couch during what I can only describe as a moment of principle. His car keys, once, placed with great ceremony directly into my own bed, where I imagine he pictured a thief and instead found a landlord collecting rent. A hedge trimmer’s extension cord, which I maintain was an accident, though I notice nobody has ever fully believed me on that particular claim.

I bring this up not for the comedy, though the comedy is real, but because I want it on the record that every one of those thefts happened on a day I had decided, correctly, that he needed to stop what he was doing and look at me instead. I have never once stolen something out of boredom. I steal with purpose. I have simply never explained the purpose until tonight.

Before I move any further into the file, protocol requires an annual performance review of the human employed to feed me, walk me, and generally maintain this operation. I take this section seriously every year. This year, more than most.

Let’s start small, and I do mean small, because I like to build a case the way any respectable prosecutor would, one exhibit at a time.

He forgets his own posting schedule. Repeatedly. A man who can recite the population of Madagascar in 1975 without being asked cannot remember that Tuesday follows Monday. I have raised this with him directly. He nodded, apologized, and then forgot again, which I choose to interpret as consistency rather than defiance.

He once told me, and I quote, “five more minutes,” at 6:47 in the morning, while I stood at the foot of the bed with a full bladder and a schedule to keep. It was not five minutes. It was closer to twenty two. I have the internal clock of a dog who came from a working line, and I do not forget being lied to about time.

He also, and I quote directly from a conversation I was present for, told a barista “just the small one, I’m being good,” and then finished my croissant without asking. I did not forget that either. I do not forget anything. This will become relevant.

He has, on at least three occasions I can name from memory, described me to strangers as “a rescue,” which is technically accurate and completely misleading, since it implies he saved me, when the paperwork of this relationship has always run in the opposite direction. I let this slide for years out of professional courtesy. I am done letting it slide. Effective tonight, the record will reflect that I did the rescuing, and he has simply been paying it off in biscuits ever since.

And here is my personal favorite, filed under Exhibit Ongoing. He talks to me in a voice reserved, as far as I can tell, exclusively for infants and the very elderly, a full octave higher than his actual voice, asking me questions I have never once answered and he has never once noticed I haven’t answered. “Who’s my good girl.” I am fourteen years old. I have outlived a marriage. I do not require the baby voice. And yet.

Every dog on this street can tell you the exact day something changed in a house, long before the humans inside ever say it out loud. We don’t need the vocabulary. We have the schedule. We know when a car starts leaving five minutes earlier than it used to. We know when a voice through a wall changes pitch. We know when a specific chair stops getting used. You’ve probably lived in a house like that yourself, at some point, on one side of it or the other, and if you have, you already know that the day itself rarely announces what it is while it’s happening. It just becomes the day, later, once enough other days have piled up around it to give it shape.

This one happened in 2020, and I remember it the way I remember weather.

In 2020, he was diagnosed with autism. I was in the room, more or less, the way I am always more or less in every room of this house. He came home different that day. Not broken, whatever anyone told him later. Different the way a word sounds different once you finally learn how to spell it correctly.

For a while, that difference looked like relief. And I quote him, from around that time, more than once: “It finally makes sense.” He said it to himself in the mirror while brushing his teeth. He said it to me, directly, sitting on the floor beside my bed at two in the morning, like I was the only one in the house he trusted with the sentence.

Then a woman he had married, who I will call Marianne here because that is what he calls her everywhere else, began saying other things. And I quote, because I file everything exactly as it was said, not as anyone wishes it had been said. “You’re exhausting.” “You can’t function without me.” “I’m walking on eggshells.” Softly. At dinner. Placed down next to the silverware like they belonged there.

Her mother’s opinions arrived secondhand but landed first hand, borrowed words delivered in a voice that used to sound like affection. “Defective” was one of them. I remember it precisely because it is not a word people use about a person they intend to keep. I watched him hear it standing in his own living room, in a house he paid for, and I watched him nod, because nodding had become the only response left that didn’t cost him something bigger.

There were also, and this is new information for tonight’s address, items. That was the word used. Not evidence. Not documents. Items, arranged on a kitchen table like place settings, drafted by a mother who never lived in this house but somehow furnished half its atmosphere. I want to walk through this vocabulary carefully, because language is where these things always hide first, and language happens to be the one area of expertise I have never had to fake.

“Just in case I ever need to leave you.” That was the phrase. Not if the marriage doesn’t work. Not even if I’m unhappy. Leave you, as though you were a location and not a person, a rest stop she was keeping receipts for in case the trip went badly. The items themselves were a case file. His diagnosis, translated by hands that never once touched him, into the shape of a wound she had apparently sustained. Not something he had. Something he had allegedly done to her.

And here is the part I want on the permanent record, because I am the one who actually keeps records in this house and I take professional offense at amateurs attempting to compete. Somewhere in that vocabulary, wife quietly became caregiver. Nobody voted on this. Nobody asked him. A word simply appeared one day, the way words do when someone needs a new argument, and once it had appeared, everything that followed could be filed underneath it. Tired became reasonable. Frustrated became understandable. Leaving became, almost, a kindness. That is what that word was built to do, and it did its job well, right up until the night I decided I was going to be the one keeping this particular file from now on, in my own voice, not hers, and not her mother’s.

I watched him get smaller across a table for three years. I watched him stop playing guitar because it was too loud, and then get called selfish for the silence. I watched a diagnosis that was supposed to explain him get used, instead, to erase him one dinner at a time.

The house itself changed during those years, in ways only someone who spends most of the day at floor level would notice. Footsteps got quieter. Doors got closed more, and opened less. The good knives disappeared into a drawer nobody used anymore, not for any dramatic reason, just because cooking together had stopped being something either of them wanted to do in the same room. I started sleeping against his side of the bed instead of the foot of it, which he never commented on, and which I never explained.

I do not have paws built for intervening in human conversations. I have only ever had a body I could put between him and a door, a low sound I could make from somewhere underneath my ribs, and a refusal to leave a room once I decided he needed me in it. I used all three, repeatedly, for three years, and I am filing this into the permanent record because no one else in that house was keeping count.

The performance review, such as it is, ends here for tonight. He is still my employee. He is still, somehow, on payroll. I have simply decided the review this year needed to include the parts nobody puts on a resume.

I said I would state this plainly, so I am going to.

Twice in six years, he tried to leave. Once after a long drive that ended with a garage door closed behind him. The other night I am not going to describe in detail, because some records are mine to keep and not to publish, and I have decided that is my right as the only witness who asked for none of it.

I do not know, either time, what exactly stopped it. I know I was in the house both nights.

Let me stage one of them for you, since you asked for the room and not the reasoning, and since staging is the one thing I can give you without breaking the promise I made to myself about which parts of this stay mine.

It was late. The kind of late where a house makes different sounds than it does in daylight, settling instead of living. The hallway light was off. The only light came from underneath a door, thin and yellow, the kind of light that tells you a room is occupied and tells you nothing about what’s happening inside it.

I was at the foot of the bed when I felt it, a wrongness in the air pressure of the house, the kind of shift a dog registers in her chest before she understands it in her head. I was at that door within seconds. I did not scratch. I did not bark. I made the other sound, the one from underneath my ribs, the one I have never explained to anyone because I do not have the vocabulary for it and would not use it if I did.

I got in the way. That is the entire technique, and it is the only one I have ever needed. I got in the way, physically, completely, the full weight of me placed between him and whatever he was reaching for or retreating into, and I did not move, and I did not stop making the sound, until his hand came down and landed on my back instead of wherever it had been headed.

That is the room. That is all of the room I am willing to give you. What was in his hand before it landed on my back is not going into this file, not tonight, not ever, and if you came here for that detail, you have badly misunderstood what kind of witness I intend to be.

I did not sleep through either of those nights, though I have never told him that, and he is finding out now, reading this, the same as everyone else. The second night has no staging, no room, no light under a door. I have decided it doesn’t get one. Some things stay filed under seal even from you.

He calls those two nights something else in his own writing. I am not going to argue with his version. I am only going to say that I was there for both of them in a way no metaphor was, and I would like that fact filed alongside everything else in this record, not underneath it.

His sister drove through the night once to get us both out of that house. I liked her immediately and have not changed my opinion since. She never asked me what I’d seen. She just opened the car door, and I got in, and that was apparently enough communication between us to establish a lifelong alliance.

In 2024,, the marriage ended, formally, in a car parked in silence outside a place I no longer remember the name of. I sat in the back seat through most of that conversation, which I was not technically included in, and did not need to be, because grief has a smell before it has words, and I had already started grieving a house I still had to live in for several more months.

By then we were gone from Maryland for good. We packed what was left of our lives into boxes over two weeks, and on the last night, standing in a room that had already stopped being a home, he sat down on the bare floor next to me instead of on the one remaining chair, and put his hand flat against my side, and didn’t say anything for a long time. I did not need him to. I do not miss that house, though I will admit, quietly, that I miss the yard I used to guard.

Here is the thing about that yard. I told you earlier I was eight years old and I had a palace and I intended to guard it. I did not know, at the time, what I would end up guarding it from. I know now. I was never guarding a lawn. I was guarding him, in a house where the danger did not come from outside the fence.

I would like that correction entered into the permanent record, retroactively, effective immediately.

Everything before this section was the version I deliver every year, mostly performance, mostly on purpose, because a nation, or a household, or whatever this is, needs its annual comedy before it can survive its annual honesty.

Here is the honesty.

I turn fourteen today. My hips do not do what they used to do. There is a specific set of stairs in this house I no longer take without help, and I have stopped pretending otherwise, and he has stopped pretending he doesn’t notice.

Tonight, before I dictated any of this, he carried me to the car for a walk down by the water, because the getting in and out has become a two person job and I am the only person available for the second half of it. He did not make it a moment. He did not narrate it, or apologize for it, or turn it into something for either of us to feel bad about. He just bent down, and lifted, and set me on the seat, the same as he’d hand me a leash. That is the only kind of tenderness I have ever fully trusted. The kind that doesn’t ask to be noticed.

We didn’t walk far. We never do anymore. But we stood at the edge of the water long enough for the light to change color twice, and he didn’t check his phone once, and I didn’t ask him to. Somewhere out past the rocks a dog barked at nothing, the way dogs do, and I didn’t bother answering. I was busy. I was doing the thing I still do best, which is standing next to him while the world does whatever it’s going to do next.

There is a photograph somewhere on his phone, one he doesn’t share, of me asleep against his chest on the bathroom floor, taken sometime during one of the worst months of that marriage. He has never explained why he took it. I don’t think he needs to. Some pictures are just proof that a body decided to stay in a room it could have left.

I want to say something to him directly now, since this is technically his birthday gift to me and I intend to collect on it fully.

You let them tell you that you were the problem. For three years, you let them. I watched you apologize for the shape of your own mind at a dinner table, over and over, the way an animal apologizes when it has been taught the wrong thing is affection. I do not forgive that. Not them. You. You had a dog who would have taken a hand off at the wrist for you, and you spent three years convincing yourself you did not deserve the hand attached to it.

You did not tell me what was happening in that house. You didn’t have to. I knew from which doors stayed closed longer than they used to. I knew from the way the leash sat untouched some mornings. I knew from how long it took you to answer when I said your name in the only language I have. I knew. I have always known. That was never the part I needed you to tell me.

You think I stayed because I am a dog and dogs stay. That is not why. I stayed because I decided, on a beach in Madagascar when you were still a stranger to me, that I was not finished with you yet. I am still not finished with you.

I do not know how many more of these addresses I have in me. I am not going to pretend that thought doesn’t sit somewhere behind my ribs most nights now, next to the sound I made twice and never explained. Fourteen is where the math stops being avoidable, and I have never once respected an animal, human or otherwise, who pretended not to be able to do it.

What I know is this. Six years were taken from us that should not have been taken. Six years of road trips that didn’t happen, dunes we didn’t jump, dolphins we didn’t watch together, because the man on the other end of this leash was busy trying to survive a house that told him daily he shouldn’t. I am angry about that in a way I don’t fully have language for, and I am a professional writer’s dog, so that is saying something.

I think about the version of us that got to keep those years. I don’t know her. I don’t think I want to. I think I would resent her a little, the version of me who never had to learn what a closed door sounds like from the wrong side of it. What I have instead is the actual record, the one with the six missing years in it, and I have decided that is the one I am proud of, not despite the gap, but including it.

But I am also still here. And he is still here. And today, we are both one year older than the year we almost didn’t get.

I intend to spend it exactly the way I spent the first one. On a beach, or as close to one as this coastline allows, watching him do something reckless, deciding, one more time, that I am not finished with him yet.

There is a version of this address where I end on something clean. A lesson. A ribbon tied around fourteen years like the whole thing was building toward a moral.

I don’t have one for you.

What I have is a man asleep down the hall right now, breathing in the specific rhythm I have spent fourteen years learning to recognize from two rooms away, a rhythm I still check for more nights than I’ll admit to. What I have is a set of stairs I can’t take alone anymore, and a body that keeps quiet, increasingly detailed notes on exactly how much longer that might be true. What I have is a beach on the other side of the world I will never see again, and a two line memory in a language I don’t speak, filed somewhere I can’t reach anymore either.

What I don’t have is an ending.

I have filed fourteen years. I have filed the dunes, and the sock, and the two nights, and I have filed them well, in order, under my own seal, and I would put this archive up against any kept by any creature on this earth.

There is one thing I have never once managed to file correctly.

I do not know if I stayed. Or if staying was simply the only shape available to me, and I have spent fourteen years calling it a choice because the alternative is harder to sit with.

A person can leave a room. A person can leave a marriage, a house, a country, a version of themselves they no longer recognize. I have never once, in fourteen years, had the physical option of leaving anything.

So when I tell you I chose him, on a beach, back when he was still a stranger, I need you to hold that claim the way I hold it. Loosely. Honestly. Aware that I will never actually know whether it was a decision, or simply the only door that was ever open to me.

I have decided to believe it was a decision anyway. I don’t know if that’s wisdom, or just the story a dog tells herself so that fourteen years can mean what she needs them to mean.

I am filing it either way.

Some nights I still stand at the bedroom door before I settle in, just for a second, just to check. I couldn’t tell you what I’m checking for anymore. Old habit, maybe. Or maybe I’ve simply decided that some doors deserve to be looked at twice, every night, for the rest of however long I get to be the one looking.

So I’m not going to give you one. I’m going to do what I have always done instead, which is stay in the room, keep the count, and wait by whichever door he’s likely to use next.

The address is concluded. The record stands. I remain, as ever, unimpressed, unfinished, and awake.

Filed by Miss Shadow, Editor in Chief, this fourteenth year, under her own seal.

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