Today is our sixteenth anniversary and we’re broken. Just before sunset on Monday, Mojo collapsed in a seizure on 69th and Columbus. Kiana and Tannar were walking him to our apartment and we were coming home from JFK. In the taxi on the phone with them, Mojo stopped breathing.
We brought Mojo home just nine months after we’d been married, which makes this our first anniversary without him. I was 19, Brock was 22. We were doing that thing young couples do when they get a puppy—play-acting parenthood, pretending we were older for some reason. We were in such a rush to grow up. Maybe we never had kids because Mojo made us slow down. Cocked his little chestnut head and floppy ears like More people? Why? Aren’t we the best pack ever? We’re the best pack ever!!
Everyone says that when you have a child, and especially when you have two, your heart expands in ways you can’t imagine. Your insides rearrange to fit all the love you didn’t think there was room for. I believe this, and theoretically I’m sure it would be true for me, but right now I am having the opposite problem: it feels like I’ve been cut from collarbone to crotch. My entrails keep slipping out. I try to catch them, stuff them back in, but the glurping mess just falls to the floor. My insides don’t fit. Everything in me was sized to love something that doesn’t exist anymore.
What, exactly, am I supposed to do with these pulsing lungs? This warm and aching heart?
“You know, Kiz,” Brock whispered to me Monday night, “Mojo lived with me longer than you did.”
I gasped a little. It was true.
“Mojo was my best friend,” Brock said, holding me close. Our tears ran together down my cheek. “You are my best human friend. But Mojo was my best friend. My special one.”
In summer 2020, when developers kicked us out of our first apartment in the city (no pandemics in real estate, apparently), we decided to try living separately. Neither of us could bear the thought of living far from Mojo, so we looked for two apartments as close as possible. Lo and behold, on West 69th I found a fourth-floor walkup studio and a roach-ridden one-bedroom down the block. Take it from me: the only thing worse than cutting a check to a slumlord is cutting two checks to the same slumlord. But the locations were unbeatable.
Our apartments were two minutes away—one on the east side of Columbus, one on the west. 69th is a leafy street with a fun block association and a direct entrance to Central Park. There was a man cosplaying full-time as the Joker who lived in his Audi A4 in front of Brock’s place. Mayberry.
My fourth-floor walkup was hard on Mojo’s bones, so he stayed with Brock. In those two years, I must have crossed 69th and Columbus thousands of times. Meeting Brock for coffee, walking Mojo in the park, borrowing the vacuum, bringing over laundry, and—of course—many, many indignant stompings away. Columbus Avenue was the artery between us, running rich with new blood and bad, hot blood and cold. Almost nobody knew about this living arrangement. At first we kept it quiet to protect our privacy, but as things fell apart, we did it to protect our pain.
Those two years were a long cave. When the drip, drip, drip of rupture and repair felt hopeless, Mojo’s swishing tail and lolling tongue kept me tender in the dark. Brock ain’t worth a hill of beans? Wow! Also, is it time for my midnight snack? You’re burning his typewritten letters? Dramatic! Now take me to the park!
For Mojo, a pack was a pack and that was that. The dramas of our marriage did not matter. It helped, I think, having someone soft to love in the middle when loving Brock was hard. Mojo was the one place, the middle love, where our relationship tectonics were immaterial.
Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
We don’t live on opposite sides of Columbus anymore. We live on it now, just three blocks north. For the last ten months, Mojo did his part to make sure we settled in okay. Because you know, moving in with someone is hard, even if you’re married to them. Moving on from the past is hard, even if you survived it.
Mojo was mojo through and through. Our talisman, our little charm. He shuffled off this mortal coil at the crossroads of our separate ways, lying down at 69th and Columbus as though casting a spell. Alright, you two. No more dying on your own hills. I’m dying here in the middle, setting down roots at the meeting spot. Rest with me now. Stay.
Okay, little wolf. You win. We’ll give each other sweetness all the time, like you.
You did such a good job. You were such a good boy.
Ok I just read this in entirety (did this all post to FB?) seriously I am crying AGAIN because of all of this. This little dog that could hold your hearts and souls when no one, not even your mom could. When a mother can’t be the person you need, she is always grateful for the people in the community or as in your case sweet Mojo. He always knew how to force levity and love. I will always miss him.
Wow is all that I can say after reading something so beautiful. Mojo certainly lived well and brought a lot of joy to you and Brock, as well as bringing you closer together.