Puppy Love

I wish I could describe my first love as a charming man with a mustache a beard, a defining charectaristics. I wish I could say that he had a gentle smile and strong hands, and deep voice that could make me say or do anything. Sadly, though I guess I'm not that type of girl.

Perhaps, I was always too literal and took the term puppy love more seriously than the term was really meant to be taken.

My first love was at the ripe and tender age of seven. Maybe, I was a deep child, I'll never really know. My family thought I was indiferent at time, but I think that they thought labeling me would inhibit my growth. So I never got confirmation on the doubt that I was indifferent or awkward.

I think my parents saw it as protecting me.

Even though I had a big family, I remember often feeling lonely, often longing for an exterior friendship.

I can't say that I ever found that at least not in the terms defined by human traits. My first love, my first friend, was found in a craigslist ad, and for that at least I'm glad that it wasn't a friendship based in human traits.

My first love was found in the back of an old beat-up pick-up truck. Again, I'm glad it wasn't a real person. As I reached my small hands out the old man said warningly, "that's one's a yeller!"

The man was giving away the beagle puppies, I didn't know what was going to happen to the other pups, but my parents had said simply, "We can save only one".

I saved the yeller, the one that had clung to the skirts of the cage not surrounded by its' litter mates. Maybe that symbolized something to me. I didn't listen to the mans warning, because that little pup had spoken to me. He'd told me that he'd be my friend, and that for a while the world would be alittle less lonely. That for a small moment in time things would be okay.

Life is often so delicate for a child. Things are so literal. Things that people think are small, in the eyes of a child are much grander; much more explosive.

For others, they saw him as just a dog a old saggy hound, a whining hound, somewhat of an annoyance.

But for love blinded me, I saw him as my friend, for the little girl that walked to the pick-up truck. He meant more than a creature that couldn’t talk. He meant a friend for times when the world seemed lonely. When school girls were cruel and unwelcoming, when the popular crowd shunned me.

He meant that things were going to be okay. He meant when my mind ran away with me and my thoughts scattered like broken glass, like beads on the floor, that one day they’d be put back together and the broken seams would be healed.

He was my first friend, one of my own, one that I didn’t have to wonder if he merely put up with me because of familial ties, or because of what I had. The idea that I had saved him really hardly ever came to mind, because even though I was just a kid, it felt like he had saved me.

My friend was taken away from me and I still remember that day, for a child it felt like the world was caving in. It felt like the light at the end of the tunnel was too far to reach, to grasp.

It felt like I'd be the lonely, friendless, awkard kid for an eternity. And I wish this could be a story that ends in truimp and sucess, but the truth is though I'm an adult most days I still feel like that little lost kid, but every time I think of my Beagle named Bailey I still find myself smiling at my long lost friend.

Little did I know that in pain beautiful things are born, for that’s when I found poetry. Without his long droopy ears to listen I found that though not as attentive, paper listened.

It sucked the ink up and my words sunk into it. At least it felt like that anyhow. I guess he was my first lesson in heartbreak. He prepared me for life. He taught me that just because you love something/someone it doesn’t mean they stay.

Things and people fade away, your love might not, but love isn’t some type of super- holding glue that keeps people/things together. It’s just a layer in-between. He taught me how I would love just like that man who warned me in the truck, once my heart was entangled, there was no backing out. The heeding would be just noise that hit the air, never that penetrates.

He taught me that hope isn’t always unrealistic, broken hearts heal. And broken hearts learn to love again. And hurt is only temporary but soon the pain numbs, soon the pills make the pain wholly go away. That as time goes on pain becomes a distant memory.

A sort of soft spot that you only feel when it’s pressed. Looking back I never thought that the little beagle with droopy ears might have prepared for more adult heartbreaks. But the little dog named Bailey taught me about life. And I never knew the misspelled scribbled poetry that I wrote in his honor and in my grief, would have been the spark to finding my passion.

I never knew I would heal, I felt like that hurt would always be apart of me, but each time I look back at the heartbreak and laugh, it's proof to me that hurt is always temporary.

Whenever I look back now, as much as i feel like I've grown, a great part of me still feels like that little girl hugging her Beagle, goodbye.