Willow

I wanted to name you Blossom, at first. No, my mom said. Too hard for us to pronounce. It came to me one day, with no prelude — like all the best ideas. We were sitting on the couch in our living room, talking about nothing and everything. “Willow,” I said abruptly. “What about Willow?”

My mom tested it out — the heft of it, the shape of it. “Willow,” she said. “I’m fine with it.” 

And that was that. 

Willow, the summer we adopted you came on the heels of the worst school year in my entire life. My strength was not just waning, it had completely gone from my sky, shrouded by darkness. I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes, forget all those months before, and bask in the sunlight. I did not want to think, plan, study, strategize, argue, ruminate, feel, I just wanted to be, more like the shoreline of an ocean — letting waves wash over me as they willed — than a functioning human being.

I was spending time with one of my hometown friends when she glanced at me and said, casually, that she took in a stray cat. Rather, she amended, the cat padded into her house and she let her stay. A pause. But, she started, eyes glinting. My stomach dropped, because I knew what she was about to say. 

Still, I let her take me to her house. I let her introduce you to me. Immediately, you started purring against my touch, and it was like playing tug-of-war with my tired heart. Her previous owners declawed her, my friend said. They kicked her out because they were moving, she added. And I lost my heart to you. In the nights after, I told myself I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t ready. I saw it — the path I’d have to take to convince my parents to adopt you, take care of you. It stretched, jagged with switchbacks and curves, towards the horizon, with no promise of reaching my destination. It would take all of me, I knew. I would have to pull out all my cards, hit every point. Needle and persist. 

I closed my eyes and slept, exhausted. 

But even in my dreams, I saw your future if I didn’t step in. You would be dropped off at the shelter, and, because you are older, you would stay there, passed over by visitors, in a lightless cage, until you died of old age or were euthanized. And it would be my fault. I would condemn you to such a fate, because I was tired.

I think I always knew, from the moment I saw you, that I could never let that happen. So I stood up. I dropped my white flag of surrender, I picked myself up from the mud, where I was mired knee-deep in, and trudged back to the battlefield. I settled the helmet back onto my head, and I lifted my sword, agony coursing through my limbs. 

I fought for you. Even after I had decided I was done fighting for myself. For you, I fought, and I won. We adopted you on June 24th, 2023. 

For a long time, when you would try to scratch our couch, paws scrabbling uselessly, I choked on my pity and fury. At night, I would think of your life before. Your previous owners, robbing something from you almost as essential as breathing, for their vanity. How they took you to the vet, and you went to sleep, guilelessly, before waking up to their betrayal. How they picked you up, took you outside, and set you down on your feet. Your last glimpse of them, before they shut their doors to you forever. How you scavenged for years in the wild, defenseless. How you contracted the sickness that will leave you with a bloody cough for the remainder of your life. 

I pictured you shivering in the harsh winters, never knowing why they left you. Alone. 

Were I you, my will would have withered away long away.

But yours didn’t. Oh, how it didn’t.

Willow. You belong to that name. You are like the willow tree in my neighborhood’s park, whose swaying, somnolent limbs I hung from until I was too old to. You are like the willow tree in that one house’s front yard, moving with the wind like a gentle giant. The dappled orange of your fur is sunlight trickling through the leaves, not forcing away the darkness, yet somehow slipping through it, soft and unyielding. You have been brutalized. You have been abandoned. Yet still you love. Still you play. Still you weave so gently throughout the world. When I am with you, hands sinking into your warmth, your presence is a sweet breeze brushing over my soul. 

It wouldn’t be right to ascribe words like kind or compassionate to you; to do so would be to imply you are anything like humanity. You are nothing like us — nothing like me. You are better. My love for you is not like the love I have for the people in my life. It is simple, but not plain, blinding in its purity. How else could I love you, in all your undirected goodness, which never asks for anything, but which impels me to give you the world? 

I never grasped the pain people felt when they lost a pet, as if they had lost a person. In fifth grade, a friend told me her dog died. Her voice was too somber for her age, her eyes too sad for recess. I’m sorry, I remember saying, automatically. I didn’t understand, then. I do now. I see it, the depth and texture of our animals’ souls — that no one but us will be able to recognize. You and I cannot speak to each other, but I can sense your delight in your chirps, the spring in your step, the curl of your tail. When you nuzzle my hand. When you stretch out, and your chartreuse eyes blink languorously in the sunlight. I swear — I hear you, louder than I ever could words. 

Your soul is real to me. As real as any person’s.

I am your favorite, still, in the family, despite the months I have to spend away in college. It’s as if you remember that you met me first. As if you understand what I did to have you here, with us, and how I suffered the year before we got you. Always, I want to tell you. You are my grace. My strength. Recently, we went to the vet, and he told us that you were likely older than we thought. Ten years, he said, at least. For a decade, you had no one to love you, no one to fight for you. That is over now. I fought for you, when I thought I couldn’t fight for anything anymore. Always. I will always fight for you. 

Now, of course, I live with the knowledge — the terror — that so many others have: Our animals will grow old and die, while we are still in the flush of youth. That time will arrive sooner than me and my family can prepare for. When it does, I hope that my tears will not outpace the beams of your memory falling through the darkness of grief. 

I went searching for answers to this debilitating fear, and found a chorus of voices. They will die, people said. That is an inevitability. And it will hurt — that is also an inevitability. But this will happen tomorrow, or next year, or next decade. But not today. Today, they are with you. 

So for now, I will cradle you in my lap. I will remember what you have taught me, and what you remind me of, when I look at you. Strength and grace and joy and contentment. And all things giving and lovely.