I Lost a Moment That Was About to Matter |
There are losses you expect.
And then some losses barely exist long enough to be real… and still manage to gut you.
This week, I lost a dog.
Not my dog. Not even a dog I had met.
A dog that existed for me only in the near future. A booking. A name. A small, quietly forming expectation that something gentle and uncomplicated was about to enter my life.
And then, just as quietly, it didn’t.
The dog was rehomed before I ever got there.
No goodbye. No memory. No muddy pawprints on my already questionable floors. Just an absence where a moment was supposed to be.
And absurdly, disproportionately, I was heartbroken.
Which is deeply inconvenient, because I would very much like to be the kind of person who requires actual contact before forming emotional attachments. It would simplify things. It would make me efficient. It would make me normal.
Instead, I am apparently someone who can grieve a hypothetical.
Psychology, annoyingly, has a term for this. Grief is not reserved for death. It is the brain’s response to any meaningful loss or to a disrupted connection. Even anticipated........