...

engaging in the incredible cliche of talking about how strange and confusing the grieving process is.

i lost my dog four months ago. as long as i don't think about it, the missing him hurts less. i can stave off tears so long as i don't say his name out loud. but the moment i do i feel like my chest is going to cave in on itself. i miss him dearly every day, and it feels wrong and unfair that i'll never get to see him again. every rational part of my brain understands that his passing was inevitable - as in, time passes, living creatures age, so it goes - but my heart rejects this at every turn. pets should live forever. we should never have to say goodbye. laika should still be on earth, with a family who would've loved her.

i can't think about laika without getting impossibly sad. she died long before i was even born, in a circumstance in a country i have never even set foot in, but i grieve her death the way i grieve my own dogs. it's unfair that she had to die alone, in space, so far away from anything that would've been comfortable or safe or warm. it's unfair that i also feel so unmoored from everything comfortable or safe or warm.

maybe part of the reason i grieve for laika is that, as a story, it's a story i feel connected to. as a metaphor for being alive. i, too, feel alone and trapped somewhere i can't escape from - as a metaphor. space is cold and unfeeling, and so too is life - or at least it can feel that way. laika was out there, all alone, and cold, and sometimes the human experience feels that way, too.

i could be very pessimistic about this. i could end this by saying that that's just life: we're born, we suffer, we die, or something equally as edgy. but i know in my heart, for as much as i feel lost in space, there's a lot of comfort and safety and warmth in the human experience too. there are friends, and family (chosen or blood-related), and sunsets and thick forested areas and soups and teas and all the things that make living worth it. and somewhere, in the 1950s, there was a family who would've surely love laika just like i loved my dog, and had she gotten the chance she would've found them. just like we, as people, find our way back home from "space".

ground control to major tom, i('m coming) want to come home.