86th + Lex: old subway stops and the places we used to live

Written by Lauren

The first time it happened was at Columbus Circle.

One moment I’m looking at the large, gleaming, metallic circumference of the globe sculpture, and the next, I’m being sucked up and spun through that bizarre tilt-a-whirl, deja vu feeling of I’ve been here before.

My body registered it before my head did. And it took me a moment to realize I’d unintentionally stumbled upon an old subway stop I used to frequent to when I lived here.

41 days

It happened again as I left the wine bar on the Upper West Side.

Though to be honest, I don’t think it had ever really stopped from the moment I’d collided with Columbus Circle and all the way through my walk in Central Park.

I’d stopped in to Lilly’s for a quick bite and glass of wine after a wander through Central Park on the first nice day of spring. I was making my way back towards Central Park West and the nearest subway station when I saw them.

A white fluffy dog walking down the street with her human. A Snowy dog walking down the residential side streets of the Upper West Side, not unlike the ones we’d walked across town. Streets she’d never walk down again.

And, of course, it wasn’t that that hurt.

It was that she wouldn’t walk down any streets again, ever.

It was just shy of six weeks since the day I had to say goodbye to my girl. Just 41 days since she left this side of the veil.

It had happened so slow at first, but also, so quick in the end. At thirteen years old, she’d been noticeably slowing down for the better part of a year.

But then, in recent months, the yelps of sudden pain became more frequent, the struggle to get her to eat, and the frequent bouts of rushing out of the apartment to get outside more and more common.

On a Saturday afternoon in late January I got the email. The one from my ex, who I split custody with since we’d separated and divorced a few years before, saying he’d just taken her to the emergency vet and she had confirmed liver disease, and also, what was looking like a tumor.

It wasn’t till the next day, on a conference call with the vet, that we received the news officially. The tumor was cancerous and aggressive, and while we could talk about treatment, she had lived a full, long life, and she was in so much pain.

So much pain that she’d been doing her best to hide for so long until she just couldn’t anymore.

It all connected in my head then, the seemingly disparate dots—the pup who’d once been a constant cuddle bug could barely tolerate my touches anymore, the pup who once could do a seven mile mountain hike no problem had trouble making it down the block now, the once ever-vigilant guard dog who let nary an ankle escape her wrath had let guests cross her path with little more than a growl.

“You need to take her,” the text from my ex said. “She needs to be with you.”

What he didn’t say: She’s not going to make it much longer.

Just one more good day

Just one more good day, it’s all I really wanted.

I got her back the next morning, after two weeks apart. She laid down on her bed on the folded down backseats of my Jeep as we took one last long drive out to a state park, where we had one last (short) frolic through the calf-deep snow around the wind-blown lake.

The next few days were a steady stream of pain meds and cautious hope, that maybe, maybe the meds would be enough.

I put on the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time. We’d spent so many winter days watching and rewatching those movies together. For so long, they felt like the only thread of hope I could hold on to in a time of darkness. I could only hope, as we laid together in the apartment those last days, limiting my comforting caresses to her head because I knew that to touch her anywhere else would hurt too much, that they could be as much a source of comfort and familiarity to her as they were for me.

I’d been told to not dwell in the sadness with the time I had left with her, to not let her see me cry. 

But I was never very good at doing what I was told.

And I just couldn’t shake the disbelief of the unrightness and unfairness of it all. A life of love and adventures and this is how it all ends? With me having to carry her outside because it hurt too much?

I’d look at her, in so much pain, and the tears would come, unbidden. Laying eye level with her, stroking her head, I’d tell her how much I loved her, what a good girl she’d been, how much she meant to me, and that I was going to be okay. She didn’t have to hold on any longer for me. When she was ready to go, she could let me know and I would make sure there would be no more pain for her.

That afternoon, the sun shone down as we stood out in the lot outside my apartment, her nose twitching as she smelled the cold January air, her fur blowing in the arctic wind. For brief moments of suspended pain, she looked like her young self again. Never happier than when she was outside in the cold and snow. I always used to joke that the frigid midwestern winter wind must’ve felt like a balmy beach breeze to her, a breed from the north, while I froze my ass off for her.

She face-planted in the hard, iced-over snow, her favorite seasonal pastime. And then, when the snow dog who would’ve preferred Siberia to South Carolina, started to shake from the cold, I carried her back home.

She’d ate half a hot dog that day, slept next to me in my bed.

It’d been a good day. The last good day.

Because the next day, I looked in her eyes and she told me with those liquid brown eyes of hers that she’d given me what I’d asked for, one last perfect day, a little bubble of just me and her, and she was ready to go.

I kept my promise to her. The arrangements were made.

Just two more days, two more days of me selfishly holding on to her, and then, I let her go.

And thirteen years later

And now, here I was, somehow finding myself back to the very place where it had all began. Through mere coincidence and serendipity, I was back to where I’d gotten her thirteen years before.

On the sidewalk on West 72nd street, memory tugged on long-buried moments from lifetimes ago.

The day the adoption agent had brought her to us outside the apartment on East 81st street.

Getting down on my knees on the sidewalk, Snowy coming right into my arms like she’d known she’d belonged there all along; that her tumultuous journey over the year and a half of her life of foster homes and loneliness and unknowns had all been to lead her right to this moment.

Snowy, cuddling up right next to me on the couch in the apartment, astounding the adoption agent, who was worried she wouldn’t be able to form a connection with us.

The patch of grass in Central Park where we took her to play that first day.

The same Central Park I found myself in thirteen years and 41 days later.

I barely held it together on the subway ride back downtown. I barely made it through the door of the hotel room, the tears already falling before the door had closed shut. I slid to the floor, back pressed against the door as I pulled my knees into my chest, and heaved in breaths between chest-rattling sobs.

I’d been here before, holding on for dear life as the waves of emotion wrecked their way through and out. I’d learned by now that the only way out was through.

The only way to survive was to surrender. To feel what demanded to be felt.

I stood, pacing the narrow strip of floor at the foot of the bed as the tears fell, riding out the heights and depths of the waves as the storm passed through.

There were no words. No coherent narrative or wayward stream of thought to accompany the madness. Just pure, blinding, purifying emotion.

An unspeakable tangle of grief and loss and what once had been but no longer was.

And like every storm, what’s left in the aftermath is silence and stillness. A shell-shocked reflection in the mirror. Shaking legs on unsteady feet, making their way through the wreckage scattered about.

Things lost, but still, things that remained. Survivors left behind to sort through and pick up the pieces.

Places we used to live

I hadn’t had any plans to find myself at the subway stop at 86th and Lex. It just happened to be the nearest stop to where I was trying to go.

It was worse this time.

A visceral gravity-shift so intense and perception-altering it stopped me in my tracks once I’d ascended onto the sidewalk from the subway station below.

I’d forgotten how hectic this intersection was. A conglomerate of Big Box stores and old New York stand-ins: mom and pop shoe repair shops and doctors offices.

The Bank of America ATM vestibule on the corner. The large Staples and BestBuy with escalators that had felt so foreign to me upon my arrival there a decade ago. A lot of commotion compared to the neighborhood feel of most of the Upper East Side.

A cold sweat flushed across my skin just as the shakes began. I stumbled backwards as the nausea hit.

Another flash of a memory long-forgotten. Standing on the balcony of an apartment high above and looking down at 86th Street below.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. Trying to fend off the dizzying whirr of impending doom. The involuntary freeze response and paralyzing, heart-stopping fear.

I knew what was happening. Again, I’d been here many times since the separation and divorce.

Some demons couldn’t be fought, though. Just named.

Call it what it is

“Emotional flashbacks are a rush of intense emotions related to a past traumatic event that occur without any visual memories or images . . . A reminder of a past trauma usually triggers these intense emotions. Reminders or triggers can be smells, places, or similar experiences. Some triggers are easily identified, and some are more difficult to identify. Emotional flashbacks in particular may be triggered by implicit memories — memories you aren’t consciously aware of.”

Courtney Blackledge, LCMHC-A, LCAS-A

I stood on the sidewalk for minutes that lasted hours, trying to understand. Trying to piece together the why.

What was it about this intersection? About this time in my life? Was it because my New York experience was nothing like I’d wanted it to be? And not just because of the reality of life, but because it’d been hijacked—my desires thwarted, overridden, and redirected like it would be again and again and again for the next decade of a marriage I wasn’t sure how I ever found myself in? Was it because my body thought it had been transported back to nineteen? Back into a trap I didn’t know how to begin to find my way out of?

The first time this happened had been roughly two years before. Standing in my kitchen back home in the suburbs of Detroit, hours after a benign conversation that left me shaking so bad my knees gave out and I had to crawl across the kitchen floor into the living room and onto the couch, where it took an hour in the fetal position to return to some sort of equilibrium.

Though that hadn’t been the first time I’d wondered why I hadn’t been able to move on, couldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened to me, I just didn’t know what, it was the first time my body confirmed what I’d already known, but so badly did not want to.

My body screaming loud enough for me to finally hear and listen.

I kept asking why, but I didn’t get an answer, not really. Probably some sort of combination of all those things mentioned above. But that was another hard lesson I’d learned in the last few years: you don’t always get an answer. You don’t always get to know why.

Sometimes all you get is the briefest recognition that it is. That it was.

Sometimes it’s the gaping scar left behind in the landscape—a cataclysmic reminder—that shows you just how devastating the storm actually was. 

Sometimes it’s not until the aftermath of the war, looking over the vast scope of destruction, the volume of rubble and debris you have to sort through and mortar back together with rib-cracking tears and bloodied fingers, that you can really start to acknowledge it was real after all. 

The emotional flashbacks, the triggered tail-spins, the panic attacks, the catatonic fugue states, the sheer amount of work I’ve had to do, the lists I’ve had to make (oh, yes—these are my favorite movies, these are my favorite artists, my favorite things, these are all the dreams I once had, all the things I’ve longed to do, all the places I still want to go) to remember who I am, who I was—these are irrefutable truths. Cold hard facts of my reality.

And cold hard facts, in the midst of gray seas swirling with unknowns and confusion, are life rafts. The only thing you can hold on to. To remind you that it was all real. 

Sometimes there is no alchemizing. No greater purpose to the pain. 

Sometimes all you need is to bear witness to what you are experiencing.

To acknowledge it. To hear it. And then to accept it.

Not as in, make peace with it. But to accept that it is happening. That it did happen.

And then, move forward.

At this point, I’m long past the point of blaming the storm—asking all the how could he’s. For now, it’s enough to let myself know that he did.

I carried on to Madison Avenue and worked my way up to 96th street, feeling the cool breeze of relief grow with each step I took away from the intersection and back into the present.

Old apartments

Again, I hadn’t planned to stop by my old apartment on East 81st and 1st Avenue.

But I was in the neighborhood. And after what had happened hours before, I felt compelled, perhaps pulled. To go there. To face it head-on.

I walked the streets I’d used to know. But it all looked so different now. The comedy club was still there on 2nd. The bank and Morton Williams on the corner of East 82nd and 1st. The doggie daycare in the space beneath the apartment building that had undeniably pushed me, in my grief of having just had to put down my childhood dog before moving in, to find Snowy.

I stood on the sidewalk across the street, looking up at the tall apartment building with the stairs leading to the lobby under the brown awning. It’d been a nice apartment, 6L. But it definitely hadn’t been my choice. This was Gossip Girl‘s doormen and high rise Upper East Side, and what my soul had been looking for was Rent‘s old warehouses and tenement buildings on the Lower East Side.

And standing there, I could see it, could hear the rotation of film reel as it projected from my mind:

The way the sun shone the day we got her.

The way the end of day summer heat felt like, walking her out of the service entrance next to the garage, and down the delivery ramp.

Could see myself, nineteen years old, that god awful neon pink Victoria’s Secret tank top and cheap $20 sunglasses I always wore.

Could see Snowy looking back up at me with that smile of hers she always gave me, looking up at me to make sure I was still there with her.

The fall weekend mornings stopping by Starbucks for a white mocha and banana nut bread on the way to the dog park by the river at East End Avenue. I remembered the way those autumn days in New York seemed to stretch on forever.

The mounds of snow that piled up on the corner after a storm blew in. The ones Snowy always had to rub her entire body in. The ones she always had to run up on to pee on top of like some conquering mountaineer.

Sometimes memories hurt

Brent was leaving that night, the tour moving on to the next town, the next show.

At dinner, I told him where I’d gone that day while he’d stayed back at the hotel.

“It’s like that Barenaked Ladies song,” he said. “The Old Apartment. You know the one, I know you know it.”

Involuntary tears welled and spilled down my cheeks as he read the lyrics across the table from me, the words hitting me with a clarity and poignancy the melody never could have.

Broke into the old apartment
This is where we used to live
Broken glass, broke and hungry
Broken hearts and broken bones
This is where we used to live

“We all have an old apartment, Lauren. I know it wasn’t maybe the best, but it wasn’t all bad either. We all have those places, those memories. It just hurts sometimes. Getting older hurts.”

It just hurts.

Putting time and distance behind you, a life lived, that old story, as old as time, the one of loss, of losing things you love. Of having to endure on anyway. Of never getting that moment back.

Again, I found myself remembering things I hadn’t thought about in years.

I could recall the exact layout and detail of that one bedroom apartment. The wooden parquet floors. The rolling clothing rack by the front door we used as a coatrack. The brown couch and green chaise lounge. The large, deep closet in the galley kitchen that was mostly taken up by the oversized bag of hockey equipment that was never used, but there was no where else to put it. The first night there, a box of pizza and six pack of beer. Going up to the roof to watch the fireworks over the city on the Fourth of July. The steamy, sunny July day I spent exploring the crooked, cobblestoned downtown streets all by myself that first week. The way the city felt like a convection oven in the summer, the heat radiating off every concrete surface, melting the rubber soles off cheap flip-flops.

He proposed to me in that apartment. It makes me nauseous to think of it now, though I wish it didn’t. Even now, I can feel the walls closing in on me. The hunter, the prey, the trap.

To this day, I can’t even think about trying on wedding dresses without going into an emotional wreckage of a tailspin. The words no, no, please don’t make me do it again reverberating through my mind as the tears and the shakes come without welcome. 

Sometimes I allow myself to travel back through time, back to pivotal moments, possible exit points. Allow myself to reimagine other timelines, other outcomes, follow the threads of the what might have beens. 

It keeps me up at night, sometimes. Thoughts spiraling out. 

But the truth is, my path was irrevocably changed the day he entered my life. 

And for me, it’s less about what happened to me than what was taken. 

For so long, all I’ve wanted to do is go back to that moment in time and undo it all. Wanted anything other than what unfolded next to have been my story.

We moved out of the city, back home to Michigan. Got married. Bought a house in the suburbs of Detroit. I remember the spring walks I’d take, trying my best to out walk, out pace my life, stationary as a treadmill no matter how fast I ran, daydreaming of a better life somewhere else where live oaks brushed salty shores. 

The years in coastal South Carolina. The months in that town outside the mountains upstate. The clinical coldness of the new build condo back in Michigan when COVID hit and the unraveling began.

But, for worse or for better, it is my story. The good, the bad, the ugly, the highs, the lows—they’re all mine, all apart of me, apart of who I am.

Remembering the places you used to live, all the people you used to be—it’s not about wanting to go back to those places, those people, not really. But still, a part of you wishes you could anyway, if only for a moment. Travel back through time, stand in those rooms again as a ghost, listen in on those conversations, be there again just one more time.

If only to remember.

If only to reclaim some narrative thread, create a story that makes some sort of sense out of the chaos and madness of it all—the lost moments and aimless wandering and wasted time.

If I could go back, she’d still be here. Wagging her tail and looking up at me with those liquid brown eyes, even as I was losing myself, the noose growing ever tighter around my neck. 

He was right. Sometimes memories hurt. Even the good ones.

No man’s land

My story finds me, once again, in the no man’s land of grief.

It feels deeper, this grief. The loss radiating out, linking painfully-dense emotional clusters. All the places, all the people, all the might have beens. 

It feels a lot like the fog of purgatory, this place. 

A double-edged knife of longing and regret.

The permanence of the loss finds me standing on the edge of a gaping mouth of an endless, uncrossable, insurmountable chasm that I don’t know how to even begin to get on the other side of. 

The loss of her hits anew with each first without her. 

The first time, coming home to an empty apartment, knowing she’ll never greet me in this hallway again. 

The first time I left for a trip. The first time walking the riverfront. The first spring. The first time packing my overnight bag since she’s been gone. 

I just want her to come back home. I just want to take her for a walk again. I just want to hold her again.

Sometimes I don’t even know what causes the sadness to descend. But when it does, it holds nothing back.

It’s standing at the kitchen sink, doing dishes … and then, a line from a song and you’re doubled over, clutching the counter, hitting the ground on all fours as your chest heaves, the waves of grief wracking through you, tears spilling to the floor … the water still running in the sink. 

It’s staring blankly into the middle distance while you’re out in the world, trying to remember when anything meant something other than the nothingness you now feel.

It’s the unbearableness of other peoples presence, just wanting to be alone, because you are alone. So alone, lost in your grief.

The grief is mixed with the resentment I sometimes felt towards her when she was alive.

The truth is that, though she was very sweet, she was not the easiest dog. Intensely territorial and traumatized, she was not the kind of dog that welcomed guests into the home, preferring instead to attack ankles and bark incessantly. Having people over was always a stressful ordeal that most of the time felt like a herculean task that wasn’t worth fighting for. 

In a lot of ways, she made life very difficult. More difficult than any dog I’ve ever owned in my life.

My days revolved around her. My travel and social calendar dictated by her. The demanding needs of finding a pet sitter for her if I wanted to travel, and then later on, the custody arrangement. 

And that was a whole other knot of hardness in and of itself. The fact that she was still a tie, a link, back to my old life. One I was trying so very hard to break free and move on from. I was no longer in the trenches, but the war raged on. I was no longer stationed on the front, but still found myself having to suit up in full armor for battle every other week, only to be triggered and knocked back down a few steps by each interaction with my ex that took me days to recover from.

But I knew, for her, I’d endure. I’d fight on. I’d face my enemy daily, give up nights with the person I love, just to have her by my side.

Nothing about the last few years has been easy. Nothing concerning her has ever been easy.

The inconvenience, the annoyance, her stubbornness. I console myself with the belief that only those you love with all your heart can annoy you that fucking much. 

But having to share custody of her, split my time with her made me painfully aware of the passage of time, of the limited time I had left with her. I tried to see it as the gift it was. So we made the best of it. We drove off into the wilderness for mid-week hikes out in the woods and spent afternoons in parks, forging rivers and swimming in lakes. Every night I held on a bit longer when I kissed her goodnight at the foot of my bed, because I knew, if these thirty-something years have taught me anything it’s that, nothing lasts forever. There’s always a goodbye. 

I did my best to navigate around her, to build a life around her, a life that accommodated her. I look back at the last few months of her life and wonder about how I feel about making her sleep out on the couch once a week so I could share my bed with my boyfriend instead of her. I still don’t know if I made the right choice. At the time, it felt like I was. Putting my significant other above my dog once a week didn’t seem like too much to ask for. But now, I know, she’d been in so much pain and the bed so much more comfortable than the hard futon or concrete floor. It hurts to think about it now, remembering the stiffness in her legs when she woke up to greet me the next morning, tail unwaveringly wagging, so excited to see me again regardless.

The time, on the way home from the vet, driving through a neighborhood I was considering buying a house in. I was too distracted, too consumed with trying to figure out my next steps to see she was in such distress and pain in the backseat. I barely managed to pull over and get her out of the car before it was too late. 

There are moments, when I remember times like those, that I hate myself, hate the way I was too caught up in my own bullshit to be there for her like I should have been. How I wanted to have been. 

In a lot of ways, my life is easier since she’s been gone. I didn’t realize the immensity of it until it all fell away.

And yet.

I’d do just about damn near anything to have her back with me. One more walk. One more day in the woods.

When I look back now, I see

I never would’ve made it through without her. For so many years, she was my constant and closest friend. The sole source of unconditional, unfailing love. My beacon of light in a decade of darkness. 

It was her who was there with me. Coming to me after having to put Spritzer down. From New York to Michigan to South Carolina and back again. Throughout a marriage that felt like a cage. And then, throughout the divorce and the aftermath. All the times I held on to her as I cried on the living room floor, just me and her, as I stitched the fragmented pieces of my psyche back together again and rebuilt my life from scratch.

It was her, who made the move with me to this downtown apartment I’d always dreamed of living in. As much as I struggled with the life I wanted to live here colliding with the ever-increasing responsibility of taking care of her as she grew older, as much as the need to go up and down the stairs to get outside four, sometimes five times a day and in the middle of the night, and the long stretches of time she spent dawdling about in the lots outside the apartment frustrated the hell out of me, at least I wasn’t alone. She was with me. She kept the emptiness and loneliness at bay.

I didn’t know then, how thankful I’d be now for all the time she gave me. For all the time I got to spend, just me and her.

And now, I’m still here. In the apartment where she spent her last days. Looking at the concrete floor where she laid, sedated on round-the-clock pain killers I had to force feed her. Touching the spot on the bed next to me where she’d laid her last night, in so much pain it hurt to move.

This place will never not be the apartment where she last existed. I can’t walk my neighborhood without seeing her everywhere. 

Her absence here is a palpable void. One I want to run from, but one from which I have no energy to escape. 

I didn’t know just how much space she took up until she was gone.

At the crossroads again

I’ve always believed that you never really lose those you love, even after they’re gone. I’ve always believed that you will always carry them with you, in your heart, in your memories, in the cells of your skin where they once touched you, in every fiber of your being where their impression is left behind. 

I’ve always found comfort in the words of great writers. Taking to heart the words of great authors like JRR Tolkien,

“Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it, white shores, and beyond, a far green country, and a swift sunrise.”

And Phillip Pullman,

“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”

… She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever. 

“I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again … I’ll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you … we’ll live in the birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams … and when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight.”

And though the loss of my girl feels like a crushing weight I’m never going to be free of, I know that I know that I know that this grief is a burden I will gladly bear for having had her in my life. 

The need to reach out and feel her, to run my fingers through her fur, to feel the sinews of her muscles beneath my fingertips is almost too much to take at times. It’s primal, this need. And the fact that I never get to feel her again is something that I don’t know what to do with. 

At the end of The Return of the King, Frodo asks,

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand … there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”

How do you move forward? 

I don’t know. I don’t know how to begin. I don’t know how to get on the other side of this.  I don’t know how to get there other than to just endure.

All I know is that I must. 

A part of me never wants to, get on the other side. Because to get to the other side of it is to accept that I’ve gone on another day existing in a world without her. 

So, I cling to her blanket instead, and rock back and forth as I sit on the edge of my mattress as the tears come. I look at the photos of her saved in my phone. I keep her bed in the trunk of my car because I can’t bear to be without it. I keep her babies and her bowls in a memory box with her name on it in my closet, keep her ashes in a box on my bookshelf until I can take them back to the beaches and mountains of South Carolina on my next spirit quest. I listen to the playlist of sad songs that make me cry. 

And I remember. 

I remember her. 

Sometimes I’m able to be grateful, to believe in divine timing. 

Her coming into my life right when I was entering into my marriage. Her leaving it right as post-divorce alimony was coming to an end, almost like she knew it was my time to make it on my own.

She was there, right when I needed her, at the exact time I needed her.

There’s a theory out there that time is an illusion. That every moment in time is always happening, simultaneously. Everything that’s coming has already happened. Everything that’s already happened continues to be.

Everything everywhere all at once. 

So somewhere, right now, we’re still and always will be, walking down a beach on the South Carolina coast, the setting sun reflecting off the waves as they gently roll in on the sand beneath our feet. Snowy, looking back at me, wide smile on her face and tongue hanging out, and me, looking back at her.

Thank you, my sweet girl, for all the years of love and companionship, for all the places you walked alongside me through this life, for saving me again and again. 

See you on the other side.