dear mugi,
you died in june, but i miss you more when the winds get a little chillier, when the skies get darker faster, when the air smells a little fresher. i miss you in the afternoons when the sun is setting behind the jagged horizon of buildings in the distance, i miss you in the early mornings when i step outside and wrap my jacket tighter around my shoulders, i miss you when i'm walking to school with about you blasting in my earphones, i miss you late at night when the tears won't subside.
it's been five years. it hits me like a train, like a gust of wind. five years. that's pretty long, mugi. for five years, i've searched for the right way to convey my grief, the perfect words to describe my deep misery. for five years, i've put off writing about you. because how could i? there aren't enough words, phrases, idioms, expressions, dialects, languages, to show the world how much i miss you. what would i give to spend one more day, maybe even just one more hour with you? to go on one last walk with you? to give you one last treat? to play hide and seek with you one last time?
but maybe five years was enough time for me to realize that there simply isn't any right way to describe my sorrow. there's no way to perfectly organize my thoughts and words. so here is my five-year-late letter to you, and i hope you'll forgive me for my clumsy writing.
grief, i've realized, comes in all different shapes and sizes. it manifests itself through the photographs of you i refuse to delete, even though they take up a pretty big chunk of the storage on my phone. it manifests itself through the inexplicable sadness i feel sometimes and through the depressive episodes. it manifests itself through the flashback i get every time i cry, because i remember how you would leave your warm little bed to come lick my hand when you could tell i was feeling under the weather. it manifests itself through the unending regret that i never got to give you the expensive peanut butter dog treats we got as a gift just because we still had an open bag of the cheaper ones. it manifests itself through my unwillingness to believe in god, because the day that you died, i begged and begged him that your sudden sickness was nothing serious. then you came back to me, cold, unmoving, mouth ajar, eyes glassy, and if god does exist, i'll never forgive him for what he did to you.
ms. dumont told us, years ago, something that has stuck with me to this day. the 'absolute' size of your sadness around a certain negative event won't ever diminish. however, the 'relative' size of it will. in other words, you'll always be sad about it, but your life will grow around the event. and the longer you live, the bigger your life grows and the smaller that event will feel in relativity. so that's what i remind myself every time the misery feels too much to bear.
they say time heals all wounds. i used to not believe it. but i think now i do, because i cry less often, get depressed less often, and i think about you less often.
but despite all that, you're still my little puppy, and you will forever be. i miss you. i always will. and i don't think i'll ever truly recover from this sadness, for as long as i live. but my life grows ever bigger around it. and i hope that when i one day die, it'll feel like coming home at night from a drive with mom and dad, home to a warm house with you coming to greet us at the door.
-y