July 10, 2007

• I’ve started losing control of my dreams, and they keep bringing me to happiness, making the reality of morning more painful.

  I wish I could flip open my phone and press the one key that dials your number so I could talk to you, pour out what’s going on in my head, because you would know what I’m talking about and what it feels like…. at least, I used to think you would know.

  So abrupt and so cold, without even giving me a chance to fight for what I thought was a loving future for all of us.

  “Sarah, can you please come to the front? …. There’s a cute puuuuuuppy here,” Rochelle’s voice  whines over the PA system. Putting down the dog food I was about to shelve, I skip to the registers, pasting a fake smile on my face. Kneeling, I let the small dog sniff my hand. Coldly, with my face hidden by my hair, I harden my heart against the innocent licking of its tongue.
  “It’s so adorable,” I croon softly, and flash a smile at Rochelle before getting up and returning to the back of the store.

  I don’t hold puppies anymore.

  You have to be a certain kind of crazy to work in a pet store; cementing your mouth closed to the inhumanity of man as fat housewives buy goldfish by the dozen to hand them out as party favors, or fathers in ragged shirts and swollen beerguts allow their ill-mannered and disgusting children to buy “just” a guinea pig to silence their selfish screeching. To work in such an environment, you need to be able to find joy at the smallest, most insignificant thing as watching a baby parrot take its first clumsy flight around a room, or a sick or wounded animal finally opening its eyes to see you. You need to be able to laugh when someone jokes about putting a mouse in a sock and bashing it against a table, because in a deep corner of your brain you are repressing the knowledge that someone out there actually does that for fun.

  So I bravely smile when someone I know walks in the door and asks me what I’m doing, working in a pet store with my college degree. “I have nothing better to do,” I always reply. But my heart, to anyone who is willing to listen, whispers “This is where I belong.”

  Is this the bargaining stage of grief? Is this where I offer you something in exchange for your help? Because honest to god, Mickey, I have nothing to offer you but my friendship, constant as gravity, and a lifetime of laughter if you would let me.

  I wonder if you even need that, though, with all your money and connections, you can spend the rest of your years on permanent vacation, meeting an endless line of people until you forget my face, the sound of my voice. And that which I thought made me unique and special, you will eventually find in someone else.

  • 1:57 pm
  • 2 Comments