I am not misunderstood to be anything less than a woman, and yet fall into dream over the most despicable of men. I am a sucker for power, I can smell it, it smells good, enticing like Madison Avenue, the street of evil. I went there once trying to find a modern art museum and ended up stepping on a poodle. In my neighborhood the rats who circle the trashcans at 4 a.m. eat poodles whole, swallowing their pink knit sweaters and hair bands, and digesting every curl. I am not fond of the rats, but this thought makes me like them at least a little bit. There are also the junkyard dogs in my neighborhood, hair all matted from rolling around in other dog’s shit and scents, eyes poked out by bumping into beams during dog fights. Ah, the smell of them while they are sleeping, you pass them and they might as well be dead.

I heard it rumored at a bar that there are illegal dog fights that happen in this neighborhood, and this is why there are so many half-dead dogs lying around in the street. They were the losers, the ones who had to be abandoned. I once met a man on the jogging track who said that his dog had been stolen right from his front yard while his brother was inside watching TV. He thinks it was stolen to be the weakling in fights. He was almost crying, and handing out flyers with inkjet printed color pictures of his dog.

I felt sad, and thought of my own dead dog. The one that died of neglect and a lack of love, that wanted love so badly that she had to be neglected, always lapping, licking, and forcing her head under your hand at every moment, wanting to be pet. She stopped eating, and developed a strange and rare dog-cancer that started in her front leg and then moved into all her bones. Then she was quiet, just silently whimpering to herself, wanting love but wanting too much of it, and never being satisfied with what she had. Not a tough dog, but a dog born into a sad and broken household who absorbed all the sadness and brokenness and tried to amend it by believing that love could cure anything. I have never before seen anyone or anything die from a lack of love, but now that I have seen it I will never again crave anything that I do not already possess.

annemie maes and kristin prevallet (excerpt of peopledatabase)