Dogs are deceptively simple beings. Their shiny round eyes, charmingly bop-ready noses, and protruding tongues magically contort into pseudo-smiles and loving gazes that feed us aesthetic signals of easy love—even though those signals most likely translate to things like “I am hungry and so very scared at all times. Please help me.”
A sustained yearning for a simple kind of love—an embarrassing condition of being in my twenties and having been heartbroken—compelled me to adopt Alfie, my 20-pound, eternally scruffy terrier mix. When I stumbled upon his obscenely adorable photo on the Dallas Pets Alive Instagram feed, I had to bring him into my life.
“If you stopped scrolling, that means you love me.”
When I came across Alfie’s image, the year was 2016 and real love felt like an elusive concept. I was navigating a slow-burn breakup with a cohabiting partner whose family came from a conservative small town called Smithville. I felt threatened by the town’s very essence and avoided visiting. She interpreted my avoidance as an unwillingness to work on the relationship, but her reductive outlook only accentuated the true sources of my discomfort. I just wanted to be with someone equally aware of how my brown skin and our mixed partnership could be deadly risks in certain Texan towns where (mostly) white people walk out of churches with their guns visible. This was the kind of existential tension that the events of 2016 put beyond the realm of “healthy compromise.”
Anyway, getting a dog seemed like it could be nice. The search for a pet was partially an attempt by me and my partner to make a relationship feel more sustainable.
Searching for adoptable dogs on social media was a welcome diversion from my habitual doom scrolling through increasingly horrifying election headlines. In our frustratingly rigid two-party system, one faction seemed to be leaning into white supremacy, nationalism, xenophobia, and misogyny more explicitly. As an immigrant to the United States from the Caribbean, these things didn’t feel new or shocking; they just felt louder and more immediately threatening.
Alfie was meant to be a band aid—an aesthetically pleasing container for an implosion my partner and I refused to confront. This motive became abundantly clear when she created an Instagram account with the handle @hey_alfie mere minutes after we picked him up from his foster family in Dallas. He had joined social media after being alive for just 9 months and shared his first “Hello world” post while asleep in the backseat of a Mazda 3. He was expected to be pretty, perfect, and filtered to maximize “likes,” all while magically mending a bond between two people.
We stopped by a PetSmart close to the one-bedroom apartment we shared to pick up food, toys, a crate, a collar, and an engraved name tag. I paid for everything, including the adoption fees and the pet fee required by my apartment complex.
The day I brought Alfie home, I spent over $1,000.
In a cold, calculable way, the financial realities of the adoption strained materialistic fractures that would soon tear me and my partner apart. She was working at a bookstore on a part-time basis and I was working in a full-time tech job that paid a comfortable salary. I had added her to my lease even though I continued handling the entirety of our rent payments. She grew to resent the absorption of her life into mine, a development that only amplified the fact that her aspirations had never belonged to her. The cost of adopting Alfie was just one more divisive line item on the balance sheet we were silently tracking.
My name and phone number ended up on the back of Alfie’s name tag, emphasizing that he was functionally mine, not ours. That led my partner to try clinging to a sense of agency in other ways, like being in charge of Alfie’s Instagram posts and taking him to the dog park. I was never territorial about these things, but it was clear that she needed to see things in that light to measure how much of her life she was determining on her own.
A few weeks after I adopted Alfie, I came home to see that he had vomited orange goo onto the carpet. I panicked and put him in my passenger seat to take him to the vet’s office right away. This meant doing a Google search for “vet near me” because this was a first for us both. While I drove, he stared at me, helpless and full of shame. He didn’t know how to make things right, but we were on our way to do that together. I was emotionally overwhelmed by the fact that I had stopped expecting this kind of thing in my romantic interactions.
The bill for our emergency visit was about $300, a manageable expense that I took care of before bringing Alfie back home to rest; I was relieved to learn that the diagnosis was nothing more than a sensitive tummy. Alfie would go on to vomit many more times in all kinds of rooms, beds, cars, and yards. He and I have always shared a vague, rumbling sense of unease that sometimes comes spilling out of us.
“Help me. It’s your job now.”
My partner didn’t like that she wasn’t included in that first vet visit. She was working an evening shift at the time and unable to come along. Jumping into caretaker mode, I tried to reassure her that everything had been addressed. I wish I had known then that being present for the caring itself was what she needed to feel more whole. She had grown up surrounded by animals in Smithville and she took it personally when she wasn’t available to help Alfie heal.
Just a few months later, we switched places. While I was at work, Alfie showed signs of a bladder infection. He had peed in his crate and my partner came home to find him trembling in the resulting mess. She took him to an emergency clinic and had them do an $800 exploratory procedure to see if he might need surgery. I didn’t know any of this had happened until I came home and found them on the couch together. Alfie, our band aid, had his own band aid where an IV had been inserted and a shaved belly that luckily wasn’t the precursor to him being cut open. The image of him and my partner on the couch was tender, but it also highlighted the fragility of our entire situation. She held Alfie for hours in silence before telling me what had happened that day. The information was both a force field and precious cargo.
“This may not last.”
Arguments about money had become a recurring issue at that point in our relationship. An $800 emergency vet bill threatened something my partner had been preserving for the entirety of our relationship: a definitive exit strategy. Even when she signed the lease, she maintained a long-term plan to get anywhere else. Deep down, I knew I was merely a detour and I embraced it because I was used to the idea that love was conditional. I helped her through panic attacks while she was curled up on the floor, kept track of her meds, nudged her toward going back to school, and fought back against my parents’ concerns that I was taking on the work of a therapist. Eventually, my partner moved all of her furniture out, bought camping equipment with her remaining funds, and embarked on a journey into the wilderness of Colorado to live on a wolf commune. She had always had a particular bond with animals that soothed the extreme difficulty of not quite fitting into the world; this was why not being able to take care of Alfie felt like rejecting a calling. Alfie spent several days sulking in the places where my partner’s things had previously been stowed, shelved, and assembled. It was a hard goodbye and the beginning of a confusing era for us both.
“What’s next?”
A romantic mismatch had led to an important bond with a wild, tiny force of nature that now depended solely on me for survival. The selfie above was taken on a Saturday afternoon during one of the many weekends I spent alone with Alfie while my former partner worked her retail job. It never fails to remind me of the ways in which Alfie makes me playful, hopeful, and more than just a person with a job and complaints.
It’s extremely difficult to get a picture of Alfie during which he is completely aware that his image is being captured. Most dogs, as far as I can tell, hate having a camera lens pointed at them. For a long time, I had also avoided crossing paths with devices that could portray my person for others to consume. This selfie on the couch with Alfie is both revelation and reclamation, sitting right there in my camera roll. After my partner left for the wilderness and Alfie adjusted to life with me, there was a sense that we had both been made more resilient. We were ready for whatever came next.
A lot came next.
“Did we lose everything?”
In an attempt to free myself of the prison my apartment had become after the breakup, I hastily relocated to a shoebox apartment in a trendy part of town. When I signed a lease, I barely registered that I was able to walk right through a security gate that wasn’t fully operational.
A few days into my lease term, I was notified at work that shoe marks were on my front door from someone kicking it in. Most of my things had been stolen. As I rushed home that afternoon and approached my door with a detective and the leasing manager, I didn’t hear Alfie making any of his signature panic sounds. I was momentarily horrified that he had been taken or harmed by the people that broke in. He was unharmed, but completely petrified. We went back to my old apartment and blew up an air mattress because I had a week left on that lease. Alfie, ungroomed and unsure of his rapidly changing surroundings, appeared to be surveying the emptiness of our lives in that moment. It was about more than physical possessions being taken; there was a sense that we were just floating from uncertainty to uncertainty.
“This is…fine?”
At the time, Alfie’s lack of proper grooming felt like a personal failure. He was my depression avatar, my loneliness ambassador. His wisps and unkempt presentation reflected a lack of control on my part. Even though I could sign a lease at a moment’s notice and buy things worth stealing, care was not a practice in my life. Alfie showed me how much I was shrinking. More had to matter if we were going to get where we needed to go. It started with haircuts.
“Remember that other caption about how things may not last?”
The photo on the left above is Alfie, asleep on my passenger seat, while I flew down I-35 in the middle of the night. It was irresponsible on a number of levels to even consider snapping pictures on my phone, but I was riding the waves of what I would later discover was a potent combination of anxiety and sleep apnea; I was waiting for something to jolt me awake. That something ended up being a metal barrier that tore my car open when I slammed into it. I spun out onto the service road. Alfie immediately darted out of the passenger seat after someone ran over from a nearby hotel and forced my car door open. I thought he had run away and it was all I could think about even though my car was only a car in the past tense. After fighting back tears, I called Alfie’s name and he came running right back into my arms. I had no injuries, which was a minor miracle given the nature of the accident. Alfie and I were still looking out from that black-and-white selfie, ready for what came next.