I’m listening to the song, “Say Something” by A Great Big World featuring Christina Aguilera.  The lyrics “say something, I’m giving up on you.  I’ll be the one, if you want me to” make no sense to me, and they remind me of you.  It is a subversive, queer interpretation.

This is a song about trying to leave and engage someone at the exact same time.  The paradox, the tension it creates seems to be intentional.  I do not know that that is how romantic love works though.  At least, it should not be.  Perhaps it is a song about dysfunction?  I want it to be more than that though.  Not that I want it to be happy and healthy. I want to preserve the pain and vulnerability of what this song means.  There can be beautiful pain, it does not have to be dysfunctional either.  I am unable to place it in a romantic context that makes sense.

Then again, I am not just trying to make a subversive, queer interpretation.  I am a subversive queer.  I know little about romantic love.  That kind of love is perhaps in the cards for some queers, it is not in the cards for a queer as I have known myself.  Perhaps this song easily lends itself to romantic relationships.  I still cannot place it in a romantic context, someone else will have to do that.  And that is fine, that someone else will probably have romantic relationships to think about.

I will have you.

“Rusty, you are a dog.”  I used to say that all the time when you were alive.  It would make you excited, even though you had no idea what I was saying.  The excitement in my voice found itself mirrored in you.  It made you happy like this song makes me sad.  Neither of us understood the lyrics, we just found ourselves experiencing something real.

You know, I write about you less often than I want to. It is primarily because I assume one can only write so many love letters to his dog and be taken seriously by others.  People have parents and spouses dying, and I am insisting to the world that I will never recover from your loss.

Perhaps the gravity of my loss is best illustrated when looking back on the deaths of my mother, cousin, and best human friend, it is your death that I think about when my ribcage begins to shake and feel like it is going to collapse into a void.  If losing you meant losing everything, maybe I am not as fortunate as those who get to cry for humans.

That is not fair though.  It is not fair to you.  You were not some consolation prize.  You were my knight in shining fur.  You were thy Lord, Rusty Shepherd.  You were the truest Roo, Mister Magoo.  There was no deficit, you were enough, more than enough.  There was something queer about it though.

Queer just like Judy Garland with her band of misfits in the Wizard of Oz.  Their happily ever after is seeing a wizard, not marrying a prince or a princess.  She found friendship in her band of misfits, because when you live in queer time, you do not always end up with marriage, or kids, or good mental health.

There is still something queer about this song, and my interpretation.  “Say something, I’m giving up on you…” is stuck in my head. Those words are paired with the image of you laying dead on the floor of the veterinary clinic where you were euthanized in 2021.  You died there.

I remember that the veterinarian said that you were an old man, you were slowing down, in your golden years.  I remember I found it queer that though she had just said this, her facial expression changed while she continued to examine you.  It was even more queer when she told me she found something else.  It meant you were dying.

It is odd that you were just an old man when she met you, and then you were dead when she decided to continue examining a bit more.  I often wish I grabbed you and took you away from her before she could condemn you to dying.  I could have controlled reality in that way.

Instead I meekly asked her if you were suffering.  She said “well yeah, starving to death is painful.”  Hearing that was painful.  It is painful in 2023.  I felt queer for even asking the question.  Yet, you were not starving to death only moments before.  Reality is queer.

So, during the pandemic, a veterinarian took mercy on us, she let me come inside the clinic so that you could die with me.  She and the other staff left us alone.  Rusty, you never understood my words. Here we were now, deep in conversation, and you could not even hear my words this time.

I rubbed your paws, and your back, and I held your face.  You felt none of this.  You were dead.  “Say something, I’m giving up on you.”  The staff were so patient, because they thought I was saying goodbye to you.

Rusty, I was waiting for you to respond to me.  I needed to know that you were alive.  I did not want you to be at peace, I wanted you to be.

I consented to euthanasia because the veterinarian said you had anywhere from a week to a few months to live and that you were suffering.  I listened as the veterinarian said what the process would entail.  Then, I sat there while your arm was shaved and you received two injections.  I watched you killed calmly, my hand was on you gently when you took your last breath.  I had a dead dog at that moment, but dammit Rusty, I thought I had a dog who could not breathe.  You were at peace.  The price of that peace was too much.  It destroyed me.  I needed you to undo that.

I was not saying goodbye.  I was waiting for you to nuzzle me.  I needed you to change reality.  I was pleading.  “Say something, I’m giving up on you.”

“I’ll be the one, if you want me to.”  So what was I Rusty?  Your savior?  Your executioner?

What am I Rusty?  So full of love, that I am crying over you more than two years later?  Am I crying over you in 2023 because I am so bereft of love?  I honestly have no idea.  This is queer, this is estrangement.  What the fuck am I? I do not know.  I wanted to be the one for you.  I did not just want to be the person who did the right thing, I wanted to be the right person.  I wanted to find a story that I belonged in.

I downplayed your death to Cameron.  I do not know why Rusty.  I have only that knowledge that Socrates had.  I really do not know why.  Was I embarrassed to tell a man how dependent I was on you?  Did I need to just talk to Cameron about happy things as a way to cope, to survive? I remember laughing with Cameron only days after you died.  It is like I was trying to give up on you, because days later you still had not said anything.

I have a theory though.  I think I downplayed your death because I was trying really hard to be the one.  My theory is that Cameron would have been jealous of you.  There was no way of telling him how much you meant to me, without making him wonder what was wrong with him that he could not measure up to a dog. I wanted to build Cameron up, and I did not know how to do that, while explaining why a dog meant everything to me.  And Cameron would have been jealous of my queer little relationship with you, because Cameron and I had our own queer little relationship.  Not romantic, not friendship.  What were “we”?  I do not know, but in the moments I felt like “we” with either him or you, I knew I wanted to be the one.

Part of me thought that downplaying your death might save Cameron.  When Cameron died by suicide a couple of months later, I remember asking him why he did that so soon after I lost you.  Before I realized he could not hear me, I realized part of the answer must be I did not take the chance to tell him how much I was suffering in the wake of your loss.  It did not work, Cameron needed something else.  I was not the one.

I should have told him that I was waiting for you to come back to life.  That eventually I had to give up on you.  I had to be disappointed enough by you that I was convinced no magic was going to happen before I could give up.  Of course, I could have just not had you euthanized.  I made it queer though.  I had you euthanized, and then I sat there wondering why you had left me, wondering if you would come back.  It is queer.

We invented ghosts to haunt.  We see ourselves in these narratives that do not actually exist.  We see stories unfolding before us that end up mocking our sense of isolation, versus giving us a sense of place or belonging.  What do we do in those instances?  When the characters of our hope, of our redemption leap off the stage into death?  We continue talking to them.  We yell and rage at them, we do anything we can to convince ourselves that they can still hear us.  When we realize the story was a sham all along, we continue telling the story.  Because what does one have besides a story when all he has is a dead dog by his side and recollections of where he thought he would be?  So, we continue telling that story.

I kept talking to you, and smoothing your fur.  I remember massaging your arms, thinking I could keep them warm.  That is the same reason I laid down next to you.  I wanted to keep you warm.  I convinced myself that so long as you were warm, you were still alive, rigor mortis would not set in.  Of course, I knew it would, but I was hoping that in telling a story, I could change reality for just a few moments.

The only way this story can even have any meaning is if I am able to talk to you.  So, I am talking to your ghost.  I am remembering that even if you were alive, you would not understand any of these words.  That prompts me to pause my writing so I can cry.  Because I know you would have understood what it means when you were alive.  That makes it easier for me to imagine that your ghost too understands what this means.  Because if I do not have your ghost, if I do not have ghosts, what do I have?

It is always such a smear when the living talks about ghosts haunting them.  It is a projection.  How could ghosts haunt people?  It is impossible.  Ghosts are haunted by the living.  It is a queer truth.

“Say something, I’m giving up on you.  I’ll be the one, if you want me to.”  There is a yearning there.  There is a bitter aggression.  This is not a parent comforting a child.  This is someone in pain needing to blame.  I’m giving up on you, why did you die on me after I had you euthanized?  What the fuck?  I’ll be the one, if you want me to.  What did you need?  A savior?  A sacrifice?  What the fuck am I supposed to be?  I wanted to be something right for you, because I have been wrong for this world.

I was born a left-handed dyslexic fag.  In the end, that was not something I was able to survive.  A queer life ends up being an impossible life.  I know what unreality is living an impossible life, knowing that this cannot be real, and that I cannot expect anything else to be real.  “I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you. Anywhere, I would have followed you.”  Maybe that makes no sense to you, but maybe that’s real.  Maybe I have given up on you, I had to.  I need to stop asking you to say something though.  The paradox of that tension, it is not your burden.  Say nothing, be at peace, I love you.