I met a friend, Jeanette, in Provincetown yesterday. I think I was in Ptown as a kid when my family would go camping at Wellfleet, but it is not a place that floods me with memories, or at least it wasn’t until yesterday.

COVID has taught me how to be very, very self-sufficient. It has taught me how to entertain myself. It has taught me how to eat in, how to do without hugs. It has taught me that the world is dangerous and it’s best to stay isolated.

I survived COVID, the isolation part, not the disease itself—that I think I got even though I tested negative, and it was there and gone like an average cold—by getting a dog. Boy oh boy, what a game changer. I have two shadows now: my own and Bird. Yesterday when I was driving back home from Provincetown, it felt like Christmas. I was going to see Bird again! I’d left him at 10:30 and I’d be home around 3. It was so much like when I was a young mother and both desperately needed to be with my daughter 24/7 and to have some alone time.

If change or separation was easy, they’d call it table tennis or vacation. Separating from my dog or from my daughter, if even just for an hour, felt and feels like pieces of velcro being torn apart, only my body is both pieces at the same time, and the tearing is an internal ripping.

It can feel easier to just not do it. It’s funny how easy it is to believe that discomfort or pain signals that we should not do a thing, when sometimes it’s just the body or mind stretching out of comfort.

What if, in first grade, kids started a series of classes that would go on through high school called How to Grow and Change? What if we learned what it was like to sit through the fire of fear and to stay with the feeling we might die as we, for example, get dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend in sixth grade?

What if classes on Being Human is Messy as Fuck were taught in high school? Maybe I would have finally gotten an A because the homework would have been more in alignment with my ADHD brain.

All of this is to say I love these dogs I saw for sale in Provincetown. I don’t know what it is about the combination of the dog’s body and the rough language, but it delights my body to the core. Sometimes swears are like butter on toast.

I had the best time with Jeanette. We talked and laughed and ate and walked around and took pictures. It was like life had been pre-COVID, only better because now I appreciated the miracle of no masks, no social distancing, open restaurants, galleries with their doors unlocked.

Today is Juneteenth. One day, years ago, many people went from being owned to being free. May this trend continue. May we release whomever we are holding in captivity, even if it is ourselves. We were born for freedom. Anything else is a misunderstanding of what it means to be human.

Here’s where you can find the dogs: https://www.studiojackie.com/bad-dog