What My Dog Taught Me

At 5:07 in the morning, my pajamas were pushed open by the wet nose for the third time. Yuanbao was holding his favorite chew stick in his mouth, performing the “hanging object” stunt on the edge of the bed. The sunlight shone through his amber eyes, casting two swaying little suns on the floor. This is the third year of our companionship, and it is also the 1826th time that he has successfully conquered my biological clock.

When I met him at the stray animal rescue station in late autumn that year, this golden retriever was sweeping the iron cage with its broken tail, like a dandelion blown by the wind. The moment he put his front paws on my knees, I heard the sound of something breaking in my chest – it turns out that the legendary “love at first sight” really exists, but the object has changed to a small puppy the size of a palm.

The first three months were a gentle domestication. He always hid his slippers under the sofa, but he would bring the long-handled umbrella from the umbrella stand in advance every rainy day; he chewed three of my poetry collections, but licked my hot back of the hand with his warm tongue over and over again when he had a fever in the middle of the night. On a rainy night when I came home after working overtime, under the warm yellow night light in the entrance hall, it sat upright and wagged its tail, which reminded me of my grandmother waiting for me under the old locust tree at the entrance of the village when I was a child.

Now we have our own secret ritual: every Thursday, we go to the park without fail, and it can always find the freshest branches in the bushes; it will crawl into the quilt on a thunderstorm day and put its cold nose against my wrist as a thermometer; even when I am stuck in writing, it will lie down beside the keyboard and use its tail to sweep the eraser crumbs off the paper pages from time to time.

At this moment, Yuanbao is stuffing the drool-stained Frisbee into my arms, and his wet eyes clearly say: “It’s time to fulfill the promise.” I suddenly realized that it was not us who were domesticating pets, but these furry little lives that had already taught humans how to love in the most clumsy way. Just like the autumn breeze that swept through the window lattice at this moment, carrying the fragrance of osmanthus and gently shaking its tail, the whole world became soft.