My best friend died for the first time fifty-eight years ago.

He died about every seven or eight years after that.

He’ll die again today. Within the hour. You get a sense for such things after awhile.

I will have him cremated.

Again.

Strange thing, this. The loss dulls, but still stings. Really, it’s the witness of well-understood unfolding of process. The saddest part isn’t that he dies, it’s that I realize I won’t ever quite love him the same way I did at first. I’ve become guarded, calloused. But it’s more than that. I think that to really, truly love something you have to know that it’s temporary. You have to know that things will eventually fall apart in some way—that entropy will ultimately win the day. It might be through death or divorce or circumstance, but every real, true, meaningful relationship is necessarily finite.

It’s just how we’re wired.

Not so with my best friend. Not so with the pet I accepted as a child with open arms and full heart.

He’s been a good companion, don’t misunderstand me. It’s just… different. I wish I was better suited to this, putting words to paper and all that. I’m also, in many ways, glad I’m not. I think some things are better understood personally, free from the tainted nature of prose.

I guess what I will do, instead, is give advice: if you seek companionship, get a dog. Or a cat. A bunny or hedgehog will suffice. Even a tarantula or lizard or gerbil or ant farm will likely do the trick for you. But just know that they are temporary. They will die. You will morn. It is the natural way of things.

But what you should not do—not ever—is do what I did when choosing a pet.

Never, ever adopt a phoenix.