I’m really, truly sorry if this picture offends anyone.
There are very few things worse on this Earth than being alone with yourself. Existing in a new place, surrounded by the faces of strangers, holding a phone list of people thousands of miles away, time zones apart is hard. You are left with your imagination, your memories, your ghosts. Without company, you start to tear yourself apart. This I know.
Driving down the Georgia backroads was a retreat from the stale air of the motel room. It was a chance to disappear into the swamp, where trailer parks skirt the muddy roads and the air is electric with the songs of the legion cicadas’ hymnal. One morning, driving along this “escape route,” I saw a big brown dog, hopping along a field of yellow wildflowers. I slowed down to watch him gallop across the clearing, chasing a crow and woofing its big, dumb woof and leaping every so often. He was alone, oblivious to the world around him, intent on the crows and the flowers and the mud.
I would pass him daily, always along the same stretch of road. Sometimes in the evenings I would put on long socks and run through the long grass, and he would sit there outside the trailer park, his head cocked slightly and his ears forward, his big tongue sagging in the heat. I would slow down and wave, as if he would understand the gesture, and immediately upon doing so he would swallow his tongue and sit up straight, like some noble gargoyle.
During a month without friends, this strange dog was my only constant. I could count on seeing him bounding along that dirt road. Over the month I was there, I would think about that dog when I was feeling down. Some nights I’d park on the shoulder and watch him go while I read a book. His joy was infectious. When the lonesome days got too much to handle, there he’d be, and everything was alright for as long as I needed to be. I wonder if he ever knew…
On the last Thursday I spent in Georgia, I went driving down that road, looking for that odd companionship, and found him lying in a heap next to a guardrail. That old crow was sitting a ways away, head low and wings spread. I stopped the car and shooed him off, and stood looking at the sad remains of my friend. I took a picture, sad that I could not have captured the joy he was so full of only hours before.
On the plane home, at 30,000 feet above the great Midwest, I turned to the pretty woman sitting next to me. I wanted to ask her if she’d ever mourned the loss of an idea, if the feeling we attribute to an absolute stranger is as real as any other feeling. I wanted to wonder with her about those moments in between, that gap between life and death, that transformation. And I wanted to ask her if she’d ever been as happy as a dog in a field of wildflowers, chasing around some bastard crow (who, I might add, would only taunt you in death). I just nearly asked if she’d ever loved a thing from so far away. And if that isn’t reciprocated, if the other side doesn’t know it’s there can we even call it love at all?
But I could tell by the way she adjusted her headphones and scraped the sparkly, silvery polish off her nails that I was overstepping the bounds of airplane acquaintances, and instead asked her if she knew the time difference between Denver and Los Angeles. We made eye contact only for a second before the pilot answered for her. And so it was that an anonymous human being stayed anonymous, and my head was hung up for the love of a dog I didn’t know.
And on a dirty Georgia road lies a pile of bones with a wildflower heart, survived by a summer breeze and remembered by a photograph taken by a person he scarcely knew existed at all.
I have a feeling this story will stay with me for a very, very long time. Thank you.
