Dreams last night involved pets dying. I don't remember the details of how my cat died, but I think it was some sort of illness that wasn't properly cared for because we were focused on something else. My friends sick mouse died because even though both of us had been paying careful attention to the sleeping area and pills laid out for it in its own little space, one of us forgot to shut the door on the way out and the next time we returned to the room to check on the sick mouse, it was gone and we knew it was dead. We realized one of us had forgotten to shut the door and I admitted it was me, even though I wasn't sure.
Even though the dream focused on small animals dying, when I woke up, I kept thinking about people making too many little mistakes and quick and easy assumptions about what is or isn't safe behavior during this ongoing virus. Such as people seeming to assume that it's reasonable to spend time in person with various other family members who don't live with them and seeming to think that they know what those other family members are doing elsewhere or whether those other family members own living environments (as well as those of other friends or family members they spend time with too) are reasonably and relatively safe, even if people aren't asking each other many questions and are choosing to make decisions based on guesses, assumptions, or a bare minimum of information, because it's easier that way.
When I was a kid and had a pet teddy bear hamster, my family was visiting a relative in another state and we couldn't take my pet with us. I overstocked its cage with extra food and water and put a book on the top of the cage, so the hamster couldn't somehow sneak itself out. When my family returned home from our trip, I almost immediately went to the hamster cage and somehow my pet had gotten out anyway. We searched the home and finally found her, huddled up in the corner of a lower kitchen cabinet, dead.
<3
ReplyDelete