Daisy asks for what she needs without apology. She is hungry, she tells me. She is lonely, she tells me. She is frightened, she tells me. I have been trying to learn this for thirty-four years. Daisy has never once apologised for needing something. She has never prefaced a request with ‘I’m sorry to bother […]
I had been performing myself for so long that I had forgotten what the original looked like. Daisy seemed to know, somehow. She kept looking at me like she was waiting for her to show up. There is a version of yourself that exists before the world gets its hands on you. Before you learn
She chose me before I knew how to choose myself. There is something undoing about being loved by a creature who has no reason to lie. I didn’t go looking for a dog. I simply wanted something to hold, something that would stay still long enough for me to catch my breath. Daisy found me.
I kept waiting for the moment I would feel better. It never arrived as a moment. It arrived as a Tuesday, and then another Tuesday, and then a walk in the rain. I had a very specific idea of what healing would look like. There would be a moment. A shift. Something would click into
She never asked me to earn it. The warmth of her, the absolute certainty of her presence — it asked nothing of me but to be there. Worth is a strange thing to learn from a dog. And yet here I am. I grew up believing that worth was something you accumulated. Good grades, good
