My very beloved doggy passed yesterday, after 17 years, 5 months and 25 days of living. He has been with me longer than anyone else in my life, except my parents and siblings. Not even my fiancée has been with me this long. I haven't stopped crying, I wrote in my last journal that he was making a great recovery but he started suffering complications just hours after I wrote it. I still can't believe what happened. It was very sudden. A friend told me it was easier to loose a pet if they were old because you were already kind of expecting it already. She lied.

My first pet, my longest friend, my eternal playmate, the one that taught me to love and respect animals, the reason I got into animal rescue. When I was 10 I got a soft case of mumps, so I was taken out of school for two weeks and I couldn't see neither my friends nor my siblings. He was my only company for those two weeks. When I was little and still feared monsters and ghosts at night, and later thieves or burglars, having him by my side always gave me reassurance, I knew he would wake me up and protect me, and so he helped me learn how to sleep through the night. When I was a silly teenager he always knew when my heart was broken and comfort me while I cried my heart out. He stayed with me through every cold, migraine or sickness I ever had. When I decided I wanted to be a vegetarian, but before my parents accepted it, I would sneak my meat from my plate to him little by little, my mom never found out what we did until I told her many years later. He was sneaky too.

My mind has been going wild thinking of all the things we went through together this many years. I guess in a way, I want to remember that he was very happy, very loved, and had a great life. As we got older I started dedicating more and more time to tending to his special needs, helping him with the stairs, making sure he eats all his food and enough water, taking him out, accommodating him in his bead, etc. I now feel a huge void at those times. Oka said he's taking me to the shelter to donate a few things we don't need anymore and the money I've been saving up from my Mondkatze commissions, that cheered me up a bit. I'm looking forward to it. Maybe now that we have a little bit of extra room we will be able to rescue a new cat.

Thank you so much to all the people that commented on my past journal, wished us the best and shared your stories. It means a lot to me, and I'm really sorry I can't give you better news. Please kiss and hug all your fur angels for me.

I'm trying to stay busy and optimist. Tomorrow begins our epic Artisan Crafts Week at #projecteducate, we have a lot of great things planned so please look up for them! I'm also working on Mondkatze commissions, somehow making homages to other people's pets helps me deal with my own loss, and I got really behind on a few of them and I want to finish them asap. I'm also going to submit things again, I haven't submitted anything new in a couple of weeks.

I think that's everything that I needed to say, I feel a little bit better already. Thank you if you made it this far