Opti and Me

It was an extremely humid morning after a night of thunderstorms that kept me mostly awake. The year was 2007. I was a starry-eyed 19-year-old girl dead set on being a woman. I had just finished my first year of college, which included a tumultuous long-distance relationship. I found myself quitting a job that my stepfather set up for me that summer in my hometown of Colorado Springs, Colorado and on the road to Hinesville, Georgia. A tiny blip on any map, Hinesville was the town where Fort Stewart Army Base was adjoined to. Said tumultuous relationship brought me the 1,628 miles across country from Colorado. A 24-hour trip that I made in 28. A decision and trip made of complete impulses disguised as love.

My boyfriend at the time was a soldier. My hometown is home to Fort Carson Army Base, where I met my then soldier who was then gone two days after meeting him. We immediately started a long-distance relationship and a year later there I was, on his doorstep, eagerly awaiting the chance for our relationship to work in real life. At the time he was living with a young couple who he served with. They just had a baby and puppy and along with military life, they were busy.

That’s why on this fateful, humid morning, Nicole, the wife, found a tiny puppy, maybe close to 2 months old and rushed him inside. She nearly burst down the door of the bedroom and started flickering the lights.

“Ryan! Justine! Do you want a puppy?” she basically screamed at us.

As much as she wanted to take him on and add him to her family, the stresses of being a new mother to both a baby and a puppy was already overwhelming.

Still groggy from a night of restless sleep, we looked at each other and eagerly said “yes!”

She handed me the towel with the puppy. He barely had any fur and was infested with fleas and mange. I rushed him to the vet where they told me he was very lucky to be found because he was a few days within death. We got him on medication and antibiotics immediately and Ryan and I found ourselves in the middle of Wal-Mart buying everything we possibly could to make our “new baby” comfortable.

The puppy was healing and needed a name now. We had just watched the first Transformers movie, and Ryan was really into them as a kid, so he was gung-ho on naming him something from the series.

“I’m going to name you Megatron,” he said as I rolled my eyes.

The puppy simply looked at him and kissed his cheek.

“No, you aren’t a Megatron, you are definitely an Optimus Prime.”

For those unfamiliar with Transformers, Megatron and Optimus Prime are brothers, one evil and one good. The name stuck and he will forever be known as Optimus Prime or Opti as most call him.

From there, I had to go back to Colorado and start school again and Ryan was being deployed to Iraq for a second tour. I got back into my ’97 Buick LaSabre and drove Optimus Prime across the country to his new home in Colorado where we lived until 2010. We journeyed our way to the Pacific Northwest for a new life post-graduation.

Optimus Prime is now 14 years old and we are back in Colorado. He doesn’t show any signs of leaving me anytime soon. He has lived on both coasts and has traveled to and through 15 different states. He was my first baby. It was only me and Optimus Prime for the first four years of his life as Ryan and I moved on with our lives separately.

My spoiled pup did everything with me, slept in bed giving me about a fourth of it, finishing my dinner and old leftovers, going on adventures and road trips.

When I met my husband Jesse, Opti immediately fell in love and so did I. A few years later Opti wasn’t pleased with us bringing home two human babies, even going as far as living with one of my neighbors for nearly a year until my son was becoming a toddler. My human kids are now 7 and 4 and he also is the older “brother” to my other 3 dogs, one other who is a rescue that I saved from a terrible living situation where she was tied to a bed without any food or water.

I don’t know what my life would have looked like if I never fell in love and took a giant risk to follow my heart. My relationship with Ryan ended on sour terms, but I will never regret making the decision to jump feet first.

Opti is a reminder that it is good to take chances and live life the way it is intended because we never know what, or who is waiting for us on the other end. I know I saved his life, and he knows I saved his. I can tell every day when I look into those big brown eyes that are starting to slowly fade that he loves me and appreciates the life I could give him. As he gets older, he won’t leave my side and gives kisses like no other dog. We were both strays trying to figure out what life really is and now we have a home and a family and each other.