Arlo
Without the proper tools to understand, we become misunderstood.
There’s lovable menace by the name of Arlo that lives at my parent’s house. He has a coat made of the most ostentatious brownish-red fur you’ve ever seen and has eyes that could strike the Devil dead-one blue, one brown. Arlo is a mischevious one year old puppy that loves to drag inanimate objects to the living room and rip them apart until he finds his next unsuspecting target. One time, he even brought a turtle from outside, brought it in the house and continued to roll it around in the afternoon hours until I caught him and saved the turtles poor life.
Though my one of my relatives truly adores Arlo, she’s the one who yells at him the most. In truth, someone’s always scolding him for something. But I don’t think he quite gets it yet—he seems to interpret it as playful attention, always assuming the best of everyone. But when you constantly hear people frustrated with him, it makes you wary. You start dodging him like a little tornado of chaos, assuming the worst in him. I’ve even found myself rushing to my parent’s guest room, quickly shutting the door behind me, sometimes locking it, as if he’s about to barrel through and wreak havoc at any moment.
I’m at my parents' house now, just Arlo and me, sitting outside in the sun. At first, I was a little nervous being out here with him. Oh God, what’s he going to do now? Is he going to attack my laptop, or jump all over me until I lose my mind? But none of that happened. He laid his head in my lap. He licked me quite a few times, looked up at me with those big, gorgeous eyes and sat with me here. This is the most relaxed I have ever seen him. No destruction on his mind, no turtles in sight, and no one around to yell at him. He’s taking a good old fashioned love bath via all these hugs I have to give.
Arlo is most of us-when we don’t feel loved, when we feel forgotten, when we feel like the ones we love are too busy for us. But instead of chewing a turtle shell, we drink ourselves into a coma. Instead of desecrating a tennis shoe, we destroy our relationships, our jobs and ourselves. Sometimes we don’t have the guidance, the love or the proper upbringing to understand how to appropriately maneuver through life.
Without the proper tools to understand, we become misunderstood. We are all Arlo.
