You’ll wake up in a cold, black room. This is not your house, that is not your dog. She looks at you with sad never-puppy eyes and you feel shame so intense it puts your leg to sleep. While you wake it up, you’ll think about what you’ve done. You’ll think about how you forgot to grow up. You’ve been aging this whole time, and you’re scared of even that. You never had to grow up, but you sure paid the price for it. How does it feel that someone else was living in your place? You don’t think you’ll ever get back to normalcy, and never-dog agrees with you, and she smiles with her teeth, and you don’t wake up from this. You never will again, this is waking up. You’re real again, you’re real again, and you decided you need to be whether you want to or not. You will rebuild the ashes. Nothing stays broken that wasn’t meant to break, and never-paws on your always hands tell you you never really broke, you just cracked. You’ll be fine.
