His name was Archie. A little mutt with a coat that was more patchwork than anything, the kind of dog you never asked for but somehow ended up with anyway. His ears were too big for his face, and he limped when he walked, dragging one back paw like the weight of the world was just a little too much for him, a little too much for anyone. I swear, sometimes I could hear him sighing. It wasn’t a dog’s sigh—it was a human one, the kind that tells you nothing’s ever going to get better.

He’d look up at me like he knew. Like maybe he knew I didn’t want to get out of bed some days, or how it felt when your lungs can’t hold the air in long enough. I think he knew I hated mirrors. I think he hated them too. He’d avoid them, like he knew that the way the light hit his scruffy fur and the way his body seemed too fragile for its own skin was something he couldn’t fix.

The nights were the worst. That’s when I’d find him curled up on the floor, staring at the door, waiting for someone to come home who would never show up. His eyes always looked the same, like they had seen enough of this place to know it wasn’t home—just a house, just a holding cell for broken things. But he didn’t have anywhere else to go. I guess neither did I.

I’d sit there with him. And it was quiet, but the kind of quiet that made you hear the crack of your bones and the empty space inside your ribs. You ever sit in a room so long that your own skin feels like someone else’s? That was me, and that was Archie too, both of us pretending to wait for something that would never come. He’d get up, stretch his body out like it hurt to do it, and then lay back down. His fur would get matted from the spots he liked to sleep in, the places where the floor felt too cold for a body to stay in one piece.

I used to think there was something tragic about dogs, the way they were always just trying to make you happy, even when their hearts were falling apart. But Archie didn’t try to make me happy. He just sat with me, like he knew. And maybe that was worse.

We both lost weight, me from staying in bed for days at a time and him because his stomach couldn’t keep anything down. I swear there was a point when he looked thinner than I did, and I used to wonder if maybe his bones had grown too heavy for his skin, the way mine did too.

Sometimes I’d sit there, watching him, wishing we could just escape together, but we were trapped in the same skin, the same house, the same life that made us both so damn tired. One day, he didn’t get up. He just lay there, curled in on himself, still and quiet, the way a body learns how to be when it’s too tired to keep fighting.

It’s funny how grief can settle in like that, slow and choking, so quiet you don’t even know it’s happening until it’s already done.

They say pets reflect their owners. They say you can look at them and see a version of yourself, some kind of parallel universe where maybe you turned out different, maybe you didn’t. But I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe Archie and I were just two things trying to survive the same damn way. Two things trying to hold on to something when everything else was falling apart.

He didn’t die. He just stopped moving. And I didn’t cry, not at first. I just sat there beside him, rubbing his fur the way I used to when he was alive, waiting for something to break. Something did. But it wasn’t in him.

It was in me.