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A GOOD CREATURE
CHRIS ADRIAN
Man’s best friend? or foe?
My ex-boyfriend tells me he’s thinking of getting a dog. This is significant to me for a few reasons. We have only been broken up for about a month, and in that time I’ve managed to put off absolutely none of the habits of mind I developed when we were together, so it still feels like we are together, and so in some pathetic way I consider him to be thinking of getting a dog for us. And it seems to me that the lonely wounded-ness he is feeling now must be considerable if it requires so soft and formidable a patch as a puppy, and that is a perverse comfort somehow, since he dumped me. And he left me in large part because I have developed a Problem in the past few years that gives me in general a horror of the ground and anything that’s touched it, along with peculiar notions of uncleanliness that led to frequent hand washing (and boyfriend washing), making everyday expressions of intimacy harder and harder and harder. He left me in particular because I could not sit on a park bench with him and stare at the river (people put their feet on park benches, after all), or sit on the floor of his apartment, or hug him spontaneously without having to assure myself he hadn’t been too close to something unclean, and, more important, because my failure to overcome my unreasonable fears in the specific context of him denoted, for him, a weakness of affection and suggested an absence of love. He left me, it occurs to me, because I could not be more like a dog.
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