Closing the distance II

(This note follows on from an earlier one, Closing the Distance. If you want the first half of the story, it's here: https://www.jeroenwats.com/notes/communication)

There is a note I wrote before this one, about my dog Quattro and a seal, two completely different species meeting for the first time in open water, faces almost touching, calm and curious with each other despite having nothing in common on paper. This one is about the opposite end of the same idea. Not two strangers understanding each other in a single moment, but two beings who have known each other so completely, for so long, that a single moment barely needs any understanding at all.

Finn is my youngest dog, two years old, and his mother Quattro still lives with us. Quattro was actually born in an Audi I owned back then, on Christmas Eve, somewhere on the Paris ring road, which is a fairly memorable way to end up with a dog. She has been with me since that night, and eventually she had Finn, who has been mine since day one too. The three of us have become our own little family, and for Finn especially, that has always been his whole world, me, Quattro, the house, the garden, the usual routines. He is almost always with me.

Yesterday that world changed rather abruptly. Finn nearly choked, on what I still do not know exactly, knowing him it probably involved a stick, some leaves, and whatever else he could find that absolutely should not have ended up inside a dog. He came running to me in a full panic, and I was on a work call at the time. Within seconds I knew I had to hang up, mid sentence, no explanation to whoever was on the other end. He was jumping against me, doing everything he could to get my attention, and I did not need him to explain what was wrong. I already knew, the same way you know when someone you have spent years with suddenly needs you, before a single word has been said.

Something happens to me when panic or real tension breaks out. I go calm, and I see the situation very clearly, almost the opposite of what the moment seems to call for. It is something I feel fortunate to have. It has always been that way, out at sea when something went badly wrong, mid ocean with no one else to hand the problem to, and it happened again here, with Finn jumping against me and no time to think about anything except what came next. I tried to get whatever was stuck out myself and could not, so eventually I picked him up by his back legs, got his head down, and somehow he brought everything back up, breakfast, twigs, a small collection of things that made me wonder exactly what he had been eating. He could breathe again, which was the important part, but he was still panicking, still coming back to me as if to say something was very wrong.

So we went to the vet, where they checked him but could not properly see what was going on, and he ended up under anaesthetic, the first time in his life he had been completely alone. Even on the rare occasions I travel without them, Finn stays with people he knows, and he still has Quattro nearby. There is almost always someone from his little world around him. Yesterday there was not.

When I picked him up afterwards he was still a bit out of it, unsure where he was, but once we got outside he walked more or less normally, and we came home. I put the fire on, started cooking, Quattro was around as she always is, Finn ate a little less than usual and eventually settled down. Then, while I was cooking, instead of lying in his usual spot in the kitchen, he came and put his head on my lap. Nothing special, just Finn wanting to be close.

Quattro had been completely unsettled the whole time he was gone. At first on our walk she simply froze, did not want to move, looking for him everywhere. It was only once I stayed calm myself, no rush, no pulling her along, that she slowly started walking with me again. At some point she found a ball, and I think it took her by surprise as much as it did me, normally Finn beats her to it in seconds, he is younger and faster these days, but this once she had it entirely to herself, and she could not resist. I could not help laughing, watching her play like that, alone, for the first time in a while. A few hours later he was lying next to his mother and I was cooking dinner as usual, and somehow everything was back where it belonged.

None of this needed a single word. Not the panic, not the moment I knew I had to drop everything, not the reassurance afterwards, not Quattro finding her ball again once her world was whole. We do not speak the same language, and yet we understood each other completely, before, during, and after. Somehow that made it more certain, not less.

That kind of recognition does not come from one big moment. It comes from thousands of small, forgettable ones, the five in the morning long walk before the sun is up, the shorter one in the afternoon, the long one at the end of the day, repeated for years without either of us noticing we were building anything at all.

I still see my friends, still go to the pub, still live a full life outside of this. But there is a different kind of knowing that only comes from that much ordinary time spent together, the kind where words stop being necessary because the noticing happens before any word would even arrive. I think most of us have at least one relationship like that in our lives, and I do not think it has much to do with how much you talk, or how well you can explain each other on paper. It has more to do with how many ordinary hours you have put in without either of you keeping score, until one day something goes wrong and you find out, without having to think about it, that you already knew exactly what to do.