Three years ago, I signed up for something more binding than my HDB loan. Unlike the loan, nobody sat me down first to explain the terms and conditions. If they had, I might actually have read them — unlike literally every other legal document in my life. I got a dog because, like most of us, I saw one lying happily in the shade of a void deck and thought: that looks like the retirement I want. Turns out he's the one who's retired. I'm the one doing overtime.

Twenty years ago, I met a dog whose eyes held the whole sky... I didn't know then that I wasn't just gaining a dog. I was signing up for twenty years of being taught, patiently and repeatedly, how to love something that could not speak. Loving a new animal does not quietly erase the one who came before — if anything, it proves how much that first love mattered, because you're choosing to survive its absence by giving the same gift again.