"He is only a dog", but he is human enough to be a great comfort.

As I type, my best and oldest friend lies in my lap, drifting in and out of consciousness. He has not eaten in more than a day, nor has he drank anything in that period except a small amount of water administered by syringe. He can barely move, though he keeps trying. It has been eighteen years since he entered my life and I am not ready for him to leave it. He's one of the few remnants of my childhood, which is perhaps why I felt the urge to write this here, on this site I used to haunt in my elementary-school days. Perhaps I will clean this up, post it somewhere else, somewhere other than the ruins of Web 2.0, somewhere where it might get more attention, but this version, typed in the BZP blog submission box at five-thirty in the morning, is the original. I joined BZPower in 2005; I adopted Nacho later the same year.

But only barely the same year. He was a belated Christmas present; we picked him up on New Years' Eve. Actually, there was another dog there too, and we had our choice of which to take. The other puppy was let out first; he was small and so very sweet. He walked up to nine-year-old me ever so calmly and politely, introduced himself in the most dignified way a four-month-old Shih Tzu could. Then the-dog-who-would-become-Nacho was released. He immediately charged my six-year-old brother, leapt into the air, slammed into him with all the power his seven-pound body could muster. My brother was actually knocked backwards.

We could tell he didn't mean any harm by it. To the contrary, he loved being there, loved to meet new people, loved to be alive. He wanted to share that with us, even if he didn't know any way to do it beyond throwing himself full-force into the nearest kindergartner.

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I "made" a spritesheet for him, back in those days when the Comics board (I believe it was called Artwork III back then, having been split off from Artwork I because the people who actually knew how to draw were tired of being overshadowed by Dark709) was the hottest place on the site. Of course by "made" I mean I took a preexisting sprite sheet (actually, it might have been by Dark709, though I no longer recall), recolored the spot on the dog's back, and was off to the races. The entire process probably took me about sixty seconds, which was the limits of my patience at the time. He only ever made one appearance in a comic I was a co-author for; why someone would let me, with my complete lack of artistic or comedic talent, touch their strip, I can only wonder. I'm glad that Brickshelf has archived my achievement in the field of bad BZPower sprite comics. Man, I was such a kid.

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I wanted to name him "Wicket," after the Ewok from Star Wars. My younger brother wanted Nacho. He was inspired by a cute MOC he had recently seen, here on BZP, that had the same name; that build is probably lost to time now. I was a little sore about losing out, but in retrospect, he definitely chose the right name.

It's funny how much of that dog comes back to this website.

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I haven't done much of anything today besides sit and worry. Every now and then I try to see if a miracle has happened, if his appetite has returned, if his body has decided not to shut itself off after all, and every now and then I am disappointed. I have my laptop, but I don't want to play or watch anything, nor do I want to read the book I have left sitting on the coffee table. I have marked my life through fiction, and I know that anything I read or watch or play now will be the thing I was reading/watching/playing when Nacho died, indelibly linked to him in my mind. I don't want to ruin a perfectly good anime series that way. Nor do I want him to be permanently associated with a bad one. Instead, I mostly scroll Twitter.

The one other bit of entertainment I afford myself is playing randomly-generated Picross puzzles. Actually, it's kind of boring, but it appeals to me. The canvas is a rigid grid, its solution locked away in the numbers, and all I have to do is put things in their place. Either I get one that's easily solvable, or else I get one where there are at least two valid solutions and it comes down to chance which one the computer thinks is right. I think I have a winning record at guessing, though.

I suppose writing is now the third interesting thing I've done.

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My brother and mother (yes, I still live with my parents at twenty-seven) have gone about their days in as ordinary a fashion as possible (given the severe winter weather we're now experiencing). How can they act like the world isn't ending?

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In a way, the Nacho I met all those years ago has already gone. It's been many years since he could run and jump and force his joie de vivre on the most proximate elementary-schooler. Then, when he went blind a couple years back, whatever energy he still had vanished. These last few months he's had difficulty walking, and sometimes even difficulty standing. Two days ago, I was already never going to take him on another walk again. But even two days ago, he wasn't skin and bones like he is right now. Where did the mass go?

As long as he's alive, there was--is--always that irrational hope beyond hope that he would somehow get better, that his eyes would regain their form and function, that his energy would come back, that his telomeres would re-lengthen. When he dies that will be it. He will stop being is and become was.

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I remember how he would greet me when I returned home from school. He was always so excited, like it was the first time we'd seen each other in years. I remember how much he used to love broccoli; I've never really heard of a dog who liked broccoli, but he always went crazy for the stuff. Whenever we had it with dinner we'd save some for him. I remember how he used to love to play with plastic water bottles, more than any actual dog toy. I remember how excited he got at so much as a glimpse of the leash. I want to keep those moments frozen, forever, as if in amber. It's not even that I didn't/don't want to grow up; I just always wished, wish, for the ability to grow down, to return to these comforting events in a format more perfect and real than memory, to reclaim my innocence, to revive the mosquito in the amber of the past.

My best friend is dying. My life can never be the same.