No thing

At night she breathes, just like me, in and out, sometimes exaggeratedly, and she wonders as I lay beside her half asleep if I am responding with my deep breathing as an answer to hers intentionally. I am. Deep cleansing breaths are a human thing, and I play along just for fun, because there are only so many biscuits allotted to me in a day.

I’m not going to say I don’t need her, because I think I do, but I also think if things were different; if humans didn’t rule the world and I was out there on my own, I’d have a better chance than her at survival. There is something in her breathing that tells me so.

There is this thing she holds in her paws, as if her paws were designed to hold it. It is not quite square in shape, it is longer on two sides, and it makes noise. Bings, rings, and songs that are often different, sometimes repeated more times than I care to hear. I watch her as she shakes her head to it, and moves her fingers swiftly, and wonder if she is instructed to do so, like the way she insisted I shake her paw, doling out treats until I got it right. If she gets a reward, she gives it to herself, from paw to mouth, and I watch and wait, anticipating the stray crumb that may come my way, accepting my fate when it doesn’t.

Besides the intake of food, my human’s mouth is very active opening and closing rapidly throughout the day with sounds unlike my bark projected towards others like her and even me and I do believe she expects me to know what she is projecting, because when I tilt my head from side to side trying to makes sense of it, she seems to think I understand. Let’s just say I aim to please.

And then there are the moments during the day when we just sit, side by side, without that thing she usually holds in her paws, just gazing out at the landscape with fluttering eyes looking at everything and no thing, breathing together silently along with the birds and all the others beyond us rhythmically, and it is then that I suppose she learns more from me than I from her….

Living is only as complicated as you make it.