I had been performing myself for so long that I had forgotten what the original looked like…or that there had ever been an original underneath the performance at all. Daisy seemed to know, though. She’d look at me the way you look at a door you’re expecting someone to come through, glancing up, waiting for the real one to show.
Do you remember the version of you that existed before the world got its hands on you? Before you learned what was acceptable and what was too much? Before you learned which parts of yourself made people lean in and which made them go quiet…before you began quietly folding away the latter? I lost track of that version somewhere in my thirties. I could not tell you the day. It’s not the kind of thing that happens on a particular Tuesday; it’s more like a room emptying so slowly you don’t notice it’s bare until you go looking for something one day and find only the gap where it used to be.
I got very good at making myself into who I needed to be. I’d walk into a room and quietly start taking pieces of myself back out of it — the opinion that might land wrong, the laugh that came too loud and got swallowed before it could arrive. Wanting things was the dangerous one. I learned to want quietly, or not to want anywhere anyone could see. I read rooms the way other people read novels, scanning for what was wanted and leaving out whatever wasn’t, and I called the exhaustion of all that “being a person.” By the time I understood what I’d been doing, there wasn’t much of the original left to go looking for. A good exterior, well kept. Not a lot behind it.
Daisy arrived when I was at my most convincing. I had the right answers. I knew how to seem fine, like the way you know a language you have spoken since childhood, fluently, without the effort of translation or having to think. On paper I was doing well: the job, the address, the pictures where I was always smiling, though none of it reached me. There was a hollow underneath the whole thing, and everything I put into it went straight through and touched nothing.
“Dogs don’t respond to facades. They respond to something underneath.”
Dogs don’t respond to facades. They respond to something underneath. They seem to sense some frequency of self that runs beneath the performance. I couldn’t perform for Daisy. She had no interest in my rehearsed answer, or managed impression, or whichever version of me cost the least to keep around. She wasn’t reading the outside at all. She was listening for the thing the outside was built to cover.
Daisy would look at me sometimes with an expression I can only call patient. She wasn’t needy, nor demanding, there was nothing that asked anything of me, just the steady attention of someone waiting for a person they know is coming and is only running a bit late. It was as if she’d already met the real me somewhere, and had decided, without any fuss about it, to hold the door until I caught up.
With Daisy there’s nothing to perform, and there never has been. She doesn’t are if I wear makeup or arrange myself into the right shape before I walk in to the room. We walk barefoot through the park and come home from the beach with sand all through the car. She’s never once suggested this is a problem. Some nights dinner happens standing up over the kitchen sink. On the good nights, it happens on the kitchen floor. It’s jus the two of us down there together, her eyes tracking every forkful with a hope she has no shame about at all.
Daisy has never asked me for perfection, or for me to be anyone other than whoever I actually am. What she wants is my presence, my love, and a bite of whatever I’m having. So I sit down on the floor, and I give her all three.