Don’t cry, don’t turn your head away, don’t hide your eyes. I’m not stupid. I know exactly what you brought me here for, and what they are about to do. I don’t mind. It was beautiful, and it lasted longer than I could have hoped for. And you know, I have a confession to make.

This is not the first time that I die for you. But let me tell you all from the start. I liked you from the moment you walked into that classroom. There was something vulnerable in your stance that attracted me. For the next three years, day after a day, sitting beside you, I was slowly but inescapably falling in Love with both your mind and your body. Yet we were just friends. Best friends in the whole wide world as far as I was concerned. But it was not enough. It is never enough for someone feeling the way I did for you.

So I made the mistake of telling you how I feel, begging you for love or for the hope. You turned me down, and my world went tumbling down. I don’t know, maybe a few years before or a few years later it would not hurt so much, but at that time it was unbearable. Now, I do remember a tub of hot water and my slashed wrists, and my tears, and life oozing out of me, but it is not something I would like to talk about.

Some may say that it was a punishment for my stupidity, others may find it a reward for some good deeds I did before, since there must have been something I did well, when I was allowed to come back to life. As a puppy.

The first thing I remember as a dog; your eyes looking at me through the bars of the cage in a pet shop. Couldn’t believe my luck. Must have been jumping up and down that cage like a mad, until you pushed your finger through the bars and let me lick it. A happiest moment of my life. You, holding me under your coat with one hand, trying to keep an umbrella upright, walking back to your apartment in a heavy storm.

Those first few weeks were the best. As a puppy I was irresistible, and you loved me with such intensity; like no man ever. You must have been missing your deceased friend, since you gave me back my name. Well, technically you have tried some other names before it, and I responded just when you called mine, but it was you that made a call. You were so full of understanding and forgiving for any mischief I did, but I must tell you that some of it were not just a playfulness. Some things I did on purpose.

You remember Mike? I Hated that guy. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all, but just the fact that he was there, instead of me, was driving me crazy. So yes, I peed into his shoes, and I ruined his favorite shirt. On purpose! And that bastard Pete. He was not a good man, by anybody’s standards, and he was not good to you, that’s for sure. I was small at the time, but had a mouth full of razor sharp teeth; so I gnawed his fingers, bite his arms and scratched his face whenever you were not looking. As if you would believe him when he whined about me.

As years went by I grew up to be less possessive and your love for me has changed. I was not welcome to lay my snout at your pillow anymore, and you hugged me less frequently, but that is something a dog got used to. You gave me all the time you could, put a food in my bowl, caressed me, took me for a long walk. Those other men were coming and going, but I was there to stay. We were a family. I didn’t take it against you when you changed my food for a cheaper one, or when you reduced my feeding to once a day.

You didn’t take it against me when I sniffed the other’s dog buts in the park, or did other gross things. It is in the nature of the dog, and I was becoming more of a dog with every day. And I liked it. I had everything I could possibly want, so much of happiness, with your love as the most important part of it. There were things I did, knowing that you hated them, but I could not help doing it. You have decided to cut my male parts, and now that I think of it, it was not the first time you made me less of a male. But as I said, nothing you have done, I will not take against you.

For more than twelve years we were a team, giving and receiving love, and if you loved me less as I was growing old, I was loving you more with every passing day. I whined for hours behind the door when you went to work, and was doing backflips when you came back. No one would be happier to see your face when the doors open, and let me fancy I have succeeded at least a couple of times to save an absolutely horrifying day at work, just by being there for you.

Now the time for the parting has come. Something in my bowels hurts like hell, and my legs give way every so often. I’m not stupid. I know. You wouldn’t let me suffer. That cheese cake would not be my first choice for the last meal, but my teeth are not what they used to be, and I’m not ungrateful.

Don’t cry, let me lick your face one last time before they came with those needles to put me to the sleep. I was happy to be your dog. Anyway, I would have hated to be a goldfish.