Buddy

Sitting on the porch, I could see the clouds moving quickly through the sky. They never seemed to find a destination, but they never seemed as if they needed to. I wish I could be like those clouds, just wandering aimlessly through life. No real purpose to serve, and no reason to find one. These were the sort of thoughts that got me into trouble growing up. These were the thoughts that gave my general lack of purpose permission to stay.

I always wanted to take that old corduroy backpack of mine, throw a few outfits in it, and hitchhike across the country. Those clouds did it everyday, minus the backpack, and they turned out alright. My mom didn't accept that reasoning though. She found too many differences between my future and theirs.

I left on a mission; I knew that I needed to find something to love, and that's the only reason I could ever stop searching. My love was found in a small town, maybe somewhere in Connecticut or something. I had been walking through the streets, wandering through the shops, talking to people and making idle chat. But what I ultimately found in those shops was not simply entertainment. It turned out to be my purpose, my love, my reasoning. It turned out to be my dog.

It may sound odd that a dog could be so much to me, but he's turned out to be the one friend I could always count on. He's the only one that seems to truly miss me when I leave.

I've always been convinced that if I can't imagine myself doing something in my mind, it won't happen. I prefer to live a life that involves mostly strangers, mostly because I don't like having people know me.

When I first took him in, he just curled up and laid on my blanket, as if he knew that it was in my home that he belonged. I don't think it's really possible to understand the relationship we had with each other. It hard for some people to see how a relationship without words could really exist, but really, that's the best kind. It's a relationship based on raw emotions, and a relationship that can only build by being around one another enough to know what the other feels without using words. Us humans have a hard time loving without words, but it's the most beautiful kind of love. And this love was the love of a dog. My dog could never do much other than love, and I could never do much other than love him back.

Late at night, when the tv channels all start showing paid infomercials and all of your facebook notifications remain the same for hours, there's no one better to keep you company than a dog. You can lay on the futon trying to play tetris, and you can look through all the articles on wikipedia, but when your dog jumps onto the futon with you and starts to snuggle up, you realize that you won't make a new high score with the level of concentration you have, and when you wake in the morning, you won't remember any of the information you read about those obscure conspiracy theories, but you will wake up with a dog keeping your blankets warm and snoring sweetly. For me, that's not much a choice. It's a given.

Sometimes, when you don't quite understand why you're sitting home alone on a Saturday night, when everyone else your age is out drinking and getting laid, you realize that you're perfectly happy just sitting with your dog. If ever you find yourself thinking about how lonely you are, you must have somehow forgotten than the dog is man's best friend. I'm not too sure of who it was that coined that phrase, but I can guarantee they had a dog like mine.