Why We Should All Be More Like Dogs.

Pinto was found beneath a cardboard box in a field.

The litter was strange: half-fluffy, half-furry, all with big paws. One had brown spots on her white coat and a deformed leg. Many looked like brown dust bunnies.

I found Pinto beside the Cape Fear River on Valentine's Day, 2010. My boyfriend and I were walking, stopped to ogle the two puppies trying to make sense of the dried fountain, corralled by two red-headed kids and a busty mother. We stood and gawked long enough that the mother lifted both and carried them to us. I held Pinto, a sleepy warm mutt baby, and we chattered about our apartment, how we missed our family dogs, how I was in grad school but no, no, we couldn't get a dog.

I took long walks in my neighborhood. At the time, I took them because I wanted to be fit. I know now I walked past the huge colonial houses to peer in their windows and pretend their lives were mine. I was escaping the small hell my boyfriend and I had made of our own house: the daily agony of what was for dinner, how was the job hunt coming along, who would break down and cry first that night.

I didn't change out of my bathrobe unless I had to.

I didn't tell my boyfriend that I'd put an ad on craigslist searching for the riverside puppy until I got a response: Great, yes, he's available this Thursday, he's yours.

Pinto rode in my lap as we drove back to the apartment. He was soft, excitable, noisy. He never smiled, and I hated him: I hated how oblivious he was to the pain his needling teeth inflicted, how he woke us with his shrieks from his crate. My boyfriend and I lay in bed, not facing each other, stiff with tension. We'd already started sleeping on the couch by then solely to get away from one another.

We fought. We fought a lot.

I took long baths though our tub was uncomfortable. I did it because the door locked, and I sat there, naked and overweight, looking at my body and trying to rationalize my misery. He loves you, I'd think. He loves you and no one else ever will.

Pinto is in my parents' backyard right now, whipping his tail and running in circles and barking at the squirrels. He sleeps in my father's recliner, tucked up like a fawn. When I was moving, first from the apartment where my boyfriend walked out on me, again from the apartment I rented alone to move back to Oklahoma, Pinto acted like a dog half his size or less. He has alligator jaws and legs like a gazelle, a tail that could--and has--broken things. But he whimpered and whined and trailed my ankles, and finally I pinpointed the source.

Cardboard. Stacks and stacks of cardboard boxes, horrifying to him, this ridiculous dog who could shred a refrigerator box in minutes. He was scared. He remembered.

Now Pinto grins whenever I enter a room and his tail whaps like a metronome. He tries to fit some of his eighty-pounds onto my lap whenever I sit down, oblivious that he no longer fits there.

But he tries, because there were many months when we were alone, me and my dog, and I would just hold him or let him out to chase frogs or run with him through the neighborhood, and though my mother uses him as an obliging foot-warmer and my father lets him lick his ears, it's still me he loves the best.

I would still stab my ex in the gut if given the chance. I've tried to tell him how his leaving on a normal afternoon, just up and driving away with no warning, was akin to a house-fire started by some mad arsonist. I've sliced him out of my life as best I know how, but he still creeps in, an awful ghost.

I have other ghosts; some are people, some are times. I might be on the brink of ghost-ing the past three years of my life. I don't know.

But Pinto? When I take Pinto to Oklahoma City to visit my brother, he hops in the car and doesn't whine or whimper. He curls up in the backseat and falls asleep, and when we get there, he's happy to hop out and start sniffing. When we get inside my brother's apartment, he finds the best spot on the couch and curls up there. He's home wherever he is, so long as I am there, too.

I envy my dog his trust in everything. I envy his unflagging optimism. I know he's an animal (and not the brightest one at that), but there's lots I've learned from him: that someone will take care of you. That it's beneficial to live in the present. That the best joys are sometimes the most mundane: a hole, a squirrel, a ride in the car. That you can't catch a ghost, and that, so long as we are together, nothing bad can happen.

Bumblebees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1N_K-zZ0nQ - Architecture in Helsinki, "One Heavy February"

When I was young, I was a bumblebee. There's a VHS of it; a small herd of little girls standing in a driveway, doing "ballet." "Ballet" is in quotes because what we were really doing was squatting and spinning and pretending. The whole affair was homegrown--the instructors were teenagers, the girls were all neighborhood recruits. For our big recital, we dove through the costume trunk: a princess, a fairy, and me, the bumblebee.

ABRUPT SHIFT IN TOPICS: Last year, I cleaned out my closet at my parents' house. I found a journal I'd kept as a first-grader, long after the bumblebee. The journal was one of those books where you fill out the questions. In my tiny, child handwriting, beside What I'd Like to Change About Myself, I wrote: I wish I was not fat.

I wish I was not fat.

I was seven years old.

I'm twenty-five now. Twenty-five, and I still scrutinize myself in the mirror. I still suffer from Mirror-Photo Dysmorphia, which is a term I made up, where you see one thing in the mirror--pale, weird face, flabby--and another in photos--blonde, big-eyed, cute. And then you see yourself through your own eyes and it's a conflagration of the two; I have a beautiful face with bad skin, I have a good skeleton with too much over it.

It's complicated and it's hard. But then what? What do you do? Something. You have do to something. And something is more than a lot of people do.

For instance: I drink buckets of water. I work out with my Wii, and then I step on the scale and it doesn't change, but I feel a lengthening in my limbs. I stand taller. I put on bright red lipstick and a smudge of blush and goddammit, I'm ready to take on the fucking day.

Body issues are nothing new for any female, and I write about it now because some idiot asshole walked into my liquor store the other day and proceeded to keep up a running monologue of how attractive he found me: "Oooh girl, sister, honey, you so fiiiine, mmm, I bet you got a man, yeah, you got a man? I bet he can't ride it like I can, mmm, I'd ride that all night, uh-huh, chunky chunky, you sure fine."

I have long felt bad about being an unattractive girl when I considered myself such, and that marked the first time I felt bad for looking good. I once made a massive mistake and aligned my life with someone terrible because I thought I was terrible enough to deserve him. I'm now with someone who loves me as I am, flabby in spots, sure, but beautiful all around.

It's hard and it's complicated.

I think about when I was the bee. I remember feeling shame because the bee costume was the only one that fit me. But I also remember everyone laughing as I did plie after plie, bending my knees when no music was playing. I won the spelling bee in third grade; I was a fat girl in leggings and a turtleneck, but I could spell. And now, no, you won't approach me at a bar because I have an epic rack and svelte legs, but when we start talking, I will make you laugh and toss my hair.

Love yourself. Hate yourself and change what you hate, and what you cannot change--my pointy nose, my height, my over-sized eyes--you accept and learn to adore.You are the only you there is, and that alone is worth something.