When His Dog Died | Post-Breakup Grief

When his dog died,

I didn’t break.

I felt the pain.

The flood of memories.

And I paused.

Not because we were still together,

we weren’t.

We were no contact.

Estranged.

He was off living a version of himself

I no longer accepted.

But I found out anyway.

Through Facebook.

A photo.

A caption.

A punch to the chest.

She was only 15 months old.

Still a baby.

Sweet, a little dim,

obsessed with biting my hands.

She enjoyed chewing my shoes.

She’d flop at my feet like she owned the place,

and liked to climb onto my lap

like she was still small enough to fit there.

She wasn’t.

But I let her anyway.

Audrey and I before the explosion.

He got her when we were together.

She was part of our story,

not the beginning,

but the middle.

The part where I still hoped

we were building something real.

When she died,

something in me cracked too.

Not for him.

Not anymore.

But for her.

And for the version of me

who still believed in the world we pretended to have.

I didn’t reach out.

Didn’t send a message.

Didn’t break the boundary I had bled to build.

But I did pause.

I cried quietly.

Alone.

In the life I was building without him.

I mourned the puppy who never got to grow up.

The sweetness she brought

to a house already soaked in silence and secrets.

I mourned the tenderness she made me feel

in a relationship that was never truly safe.

And I mourned me.

The woman who imagined a future

with his dogs at her feet

and a man who would never lie.

I didn’t send condolences.

I sent nothing.

But I felt the weight of it.

Because grief doesn’t require contact.

Only honesty.

And beneath the ache,

beneath the flicker of memory,

was something else.

Not glee.

Not vengeance.

But the quiet sense that something had been returned to the earth.

A kind of cosmic justice.

Not because she deserved it.

She didn’t.

But because the universe was coming back into balance.

I didn’t reach out.

But I felt the shift.

And I kept walking,

With silence,

With dignity,

And without looking back.

I haven’t checked his Facebook page since.