Dear Cola
周雨晴
Someone said, some sadness can be written while some cannot.
My family has kept pets for as long as I can remember. My uncle bought the pets in order not to make my grandma feel lonely because my grandfather had passed away early, before I was born. And also, my grandma loves dogs. So, in my childhood, there was always a little thing running around, woofing in our house. The first one, Poe, named by me, chased after another dog in a park and never came back. The second one, a Pomeranian called Stinky, died of liver failure. The third one’s name was Cola. It was the last dog we kept.
On October 25th, 2015, Cola died in an accident. From then on, I started to keep my diary with “Dear Cola” at the beginning every day. We spent 7 years together. It takes courage for me to reminisce about these 7 years.
Cola was really not an easy dog. Even for me, such a huge dog person, every time I tried to lift it up, it bit me. It only accepted my grandma’s hug, which made me think it loved my grandma only and wanted everybody else to go to hell. I was always trying to win its affection, all the time. Then I found the best way was to sit closest to the radiator in the winter, and then it would come near me and take a nap. The Radiator could be listed in its favorite thing rankings top 3. Once Cola’s ears even got burnt because it lay too close to the radiator.
Speaking of its favorite things, its leash is well deserved to be NO.1. As long as it heard any faintest sound of the bell on its leash, it would suddenly go into a demented mood, barking incessantly and shuttling insanely through every room in the house. After getting downstairs to the outside world, it acted like a member of a rescue crew, sticking its nose to the ground and never letting the leash have any chance to loosen a tiny little bit, even for a second.
Every time we walked it, this scene would happen. My grandma was always amused to see such a crazy Cola. However, it was never fun for me to watch this drama, which was more like a tragedy in my eyes. It was not easy for my grandma to climb upstairs and go downstairs every day to walk the dog, and also she did not like going out due to her solitary personality. In addition, Cola listened to her only. Thus, Cola was not able to see the outside world so frequently, resulting in its wild desire and excitement for outing time. What’s more, its leash and its madness always made me think of the contradiction between its identity and nature, a deep-rooted, underlying, unsolved problem. Humans invent pets to seek love and connection from each other, while eradicating their freedom. Although thanks to those good owners, while lots of pets in the world can adapt to the human society pretty well, there are still some pets living in the chasm between a prisoner and an “emotion feeder”. I don’t think love and connection can be traded as easily like pork and beef. The relationship between pets and humans has greatly influenced and changed the destiny of some species, making them half-anthropomorphized, a quite despicable joke of human beings. This annoying question bothered me for years, but as long as we shun it, it can be forgotten naturally. Then the world works still like we are all kind people with the cutest little sweethearts tied up all around us.
I always believe that every creature has its inward self. But Cola was so difficult to read through. I remember I had tried many times to read its mind by staring hard at its eyes, little longan seeds in pure black. I also tried to speak to it to see if it could understand. I presented my sentences with “woofs” in different tones slowly and seriously to make my words translated clearly. It didn’t reply but stared back at me. It also seemed to try to figure out what I said. Every time our conversation ended like this, with just a few centimeters between the fingers of God and Adam.
Every night after supper, my grandma and I watched TV together. As usual, Cola would jump up to my grandma’s lap and curl up in a sad, white, little heap, ready for its slumber. It was my grandma’s privilege to become its cushion while I hardly ever had the right to do so. But I remember once, on a winter afternoon, I pulled a chair to the balcony, where its cage was located, and was going to read some books and enjoy the beautiful afternoon sunshine. I pretended to casually pick a good seat just right beside its cage, getting my lap heated by the warmth of the sunlight. And I knew it! Having noticed a wonderful “cushion”, Cola walked lazily out of the cage and stretched its body. Then it jumped up and perched elegantly like a fat bird on my lap. Feeling free to spin around, it lay down like a roll. It narrowed its eyes, made the sound of smacking its tongue in its mouth, and yawned, seeming cozy enough. I was pretty delighted to see all this happening. And I still remember that feeling, like something lit up inside of me, making my lap, where Cola was sitting, tingled and itchy. I could almost feel that I had crossed the edge of the human world to the land of nature and souls. I thought that with all my efforts, finally it could accept my friendship and our magical connection eventually would begin to build up, though the next day it still bit me when I tried to lift it up again.
As time went by, Cola was getting older. Its aging was amazingly obvious. It used to run around throughout the whole meal, but one day we found that it had just left and went back to its cage during dinner after eating very few pieces of meat. It walked much slower than before and did not bark that loud and frequently. Most of the time it just stayed in its cage, alone on the balcony. I remember one winter that was particularly cold. My grandma moved the cage to the living room, inside the house. We used my father’s old sweater to make a thick cushion for Cola, like a fluffy bowl. Although the living room was much warmer than the balcony, at night, when everybody went to his own room to sleep, I would think of the little white furball huddling in the corner of the silent darkness in the empty living room. Sometimes I stayed up late to have a check on it; it was easily awakened, its eyelids slouching and its body trembling. In the dark I gazed at its sleepy eyes, squatting, distressed. Maybe it would never understand the meaning of my hand and the heat I passed onto it, my rejected love, and aborted connection.
Even though Cola’s getting older brought lots of changes, it didn’t change its enthusiasm for going out. If the bell on its leash started ringing, Cola would abruptly turn back into the animated little white tornado, dashing everywhere, rather than an old skeleton half buried in the ground. For me, it felt like seeing a dying fire dancing happily in the rain.
Every time I saw old Cola going out to play, a feeling of grief would cover my heart. It wasn’t used to the fresh air of the world, yet its life was coming to an end.
The ending came earlier than everyone expected. Cola was killed by car when the leash was broken and it rushed to the road, the road right down outside of my windows. I wasn’t on the spot. My parents found Cola and buried it under a tree in our neighborhood.
I always like to watch the roads outside of my windows at night. Through the street lamps that glow dully, the flying vehicles grind up the wavering shadow of sycamore leaves, now and then reminding me of the broken collapse of the vanished longing between freedom and death.
Within these years past, the concentration of the sadness begins to thin. And I dare to write these words down in memory of Cola for the first time. Now I realize, it never needed my self-righteous redemption at all. All it wanted was the warmth and satiety of the material, hopelessly waiting for the call of the leash in what I thought was loneliness, which might be the wonderful time of its life. All the pity of those unachievable dreams, the kind of daily life it should’ve owned while appearing as a priceless luxury, were all my selfish imaginations. Breathing shallowly in the darkness of the balcony or the living room, its dreamland had nothing to do with anyone, well, maybe except my grandma.
But I still wish you can run freely on the grassland in the afterlife. Because this is the only thing I know that you like.
