Part 2 \u2013 The Dog I Had to Leave Behind
\nSeven years earlier, I did not surrender Charlie because I stopped loving him.
\nI surrendered him because love, by itself, could not buy food, pay a motel deposit, or convince landlords to rent to a woman who had lost her job, her car, and nearly every piece of stability she once thought made her safe. People love to believe that losing everything happens all at once, like a storm breaking a window. For me, it happened in small ordinary failures that stacked quietly until my life had nowhere left to stand.<\/p>\n
I had been twenty-nine when the call center where I worked closed with three weeks\u2019 notice. My savings were thin because my mother\u2019s medical bills had already eaten most of them. My boyfriend at the time left three months after the layoff, not cruelly, not dramatically, just tired of being around someone whose life had become a list of problems. The apartment lease ended. My credit was damaged. A friend let me sleep on her couch for a while, but her landlord found out. After that, I stayed in a cheap motel when I could, in my car when I could not, and eventually in a women\u2019s shelter that did not allow animals.Pets & Animals<\/p>\n
Through all of it, Charlie stayed with me.<\/p>\n
He was three years old then, a golden-brown shepherd and retriever mix with a white crescent on his chest, a ridiculous feathered tail, and the kind of eyes that made strangers forgive him for being too excited. I had him as a puppy from a rescue event in a grocery store parking lot. He had chewed shoes, stolen sandwiches, slept with his head on my stomach, and once dragged a full bag of laundry down two flights of stairs because he thought I needed help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Part 2 \u2013 The Dog I Had to Leave Behind Seven years earlier, I did not surrender Charlie because I stopped loving him. I surrendered him because love, by itself, could not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1148,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralstoryworld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}