No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I can count on one hand the people in my life who won’t eventually let me down, lie to my face, or ghost me when things get messy. But a dog? Sharka? She shows up every goddamn day like I’m the only thing that matters in this busted world. No agenda, no scorekeeping, no passive-aggressive bullshit three weeks later about something I forgot I even said.
And the thing is, dogs give everything, I mean everything, without keeping receipts, without that little voice in the back of their head calculating what they’re owed. They’re not performing generosity; they’re just generous, period. It’s almost obscene how pure it is.
Maybe that’s why I’m so hung up on them. Because when I look into those eyes, I see something we all murdered in ourselves around age seven, that raw, uncut innocence we can barely remember. Dogs remind me there was a time, or could be a time, or should be a time when things didn’t have to be this compromised, this calculated, this cruel. They’re living proof that somewhere, in some version of reality I’m locked out of, nobody’s keeping score and nobody’s getting stabbed in the back. And man, don’t I ache for that.