I can still remember the first time I felt true devastation- it was the 28th of January 2019. I’d been keeping two pet mice for almost six months at that point, and I rarely thought about anything else. I can still remember sitting on the couch, about a month away from finally buying them, and asking my mother have you ever wanted something so badly it hurts? At that point she was still largely unconvinced by my obsessive campaigning. She replied, without any clear tone, yeah, it was you. In any case, I got the mice home somehow. I cobbled together a habitat for them out of an old fishtank, some store-bought toys, and a handful of sticks, rocks and similar materials from outside.

Each morning I waved goodbye to them as I pulled on my shoes and climbed into the car. At that point I was almost done with elementary school, and I really couldn’t care less about it. The only class I looked forward to was my challenge class. Initially designed to keep bright students on the honors track, it had evolved into a sort of vaguely educational exploration of our interests. So of course I told my challenge teacher about the mice. After all, he was the only non-kindergarten teacher I remember liking. I’d had some sort of feud with all the rest of them, usually over something stupid (and usually, I was right).

That was a glorious time. I would return home every afternoon and check in on them. When I was bravest, I’d gently pick them up and have them run up my arms. It was love that I was feeling, an obsession with the thought that I had them to hold, to cradle in my hands or slip into a pocket. I fantasized about taking them out walking on miniature harnesses, or training them to respond to the sound of my voice. I pictured myself walking onto the school playground in front of a crowd of curious classmates, and reaching into an oversized coat pocket to reveal two white mice. The crowd would cheer as I raised them into the air, introduced them by name, and then placed them down on the red dirt kickball field. I’d whistle (something I couldn’t, and can’t do) some simple tune, and the mice would begin a routine of synchronized running, jumping and flipping through the air, before returning to my waiting hands at the final whistle. I imagined it almost every time I walked around the track at recess, changing details and outcomes by minute amounts for the best possible show. Of course, I never did anything towards this circus routine - I think I knew then that it was better to leave it in my imagination, lest some fragment of my real life ruin it for me.

There wasn’t a ‘beginning of the end’ for the mice. One day they were there, in a tank on top of my dresser, and the next they were gone. I came home on an uncharacteristically warm Friday afternoon - the 28th of January, like I said, with the intention of replacing their bedding and washing their toys. It was something I did weekly, another small ritual in a life of predictable routines. I had something to eat - not important - and I walked into my bedroom. I opened the tank, and began removing the toys. I placed them one-by-one on a towel, save for the last one. It was an end-piece to a set of tunnels they played in almost daily. They’d built their most recent nest in it, where they slept most of the day away. By this time, my mother and I were staring over the edge of the tank at it. The end-piece was completely still.

The mouse I knew least was the first to die. She was dead when we opened the end- piece to go rooting through the nest. I lifted her powdery fur from the bedding into a small decorated box, fit for one. The other was still breathing, but barely. I spent the next hour with a heating pad over my lap, feeding her from my hand one piece of grain or drop of water at a time. All I could think about was how much stronger our bond would be once I became the one she owed her life to. I told myself that It’d be easier to choreograph a trick show for one mouse, and that it’d be easier to carry a solitary mouse in my pocket like I planned. I told myself that she’d need just a few more minutes of warmth, just another capful of water, just one more sunflower seed, and then I’d have a friend for life. One who wouldn’t move schools or indulge in mild mockery the one day of school I missed. One who was always just a hand-lift away from being right where I needed her. I smiled when I thought about it, deciding that tragedy can be lucky (if I knew where to look for the upsides)

I returned the second mouse to her tank when my mother came to tell me that she simply had to go out to dinner. My father was out of the house for some reason or another, and of course I just couldn’t possibly stay at home alone. She dropped me off at the apartment of my closest human friend, who I told the news in a suitably miserable tone. I didn’t tell her about my secret hopes for a newfound closeness, I didn’t want to jinx it. We ate pizza and sketched the mice, putting wings on the lost mouse and tears in the eyes of the other. I folded the sketchbook papers and placed them in my back-slung bag as I packed my things to leave for home. My mother had finally showed back up. I got in her car and listened, without interest, as she described her dinner. When we got home I ran inside as fast as I could. My father was sitting on the couch, watching something on television. He already knew about the first mouse. Like every afternoon, he had a flurry of questions, none of which I wanted to answer. I fled back to my room, feeling that wall of bereavement pressing up against my cautious optimism. Scratch that, it wasn’t cautious at all. It was all-engulfing, drowning out every other horrible moment I’d had in the last three hours. I pushed open the door, and ran up to the tank. I opened the lid again, moved the toys again, and I wrapped my impatient hand around a dead mouse, again.

I was at the dresser, and then I was on the couch. I had my knees up to my chin in an oversized sleeping shirt, and there was not a single positive. I never really got along with my mother at that age. She used to find something to shout at me over just about weekly. Worse than that, she thought my reactions were something calculated, intentionally meant to force her capitulation. Obviously, they were not. There’s no child in the world who knows what manipulation is, let alone has the presence of mind to effectively use it. Still, I was more irritated than usual when I stared at her from my corner of the couch. Part of me knew that there was nobody at fault. The rest of me was angry. I wanted someone to hold a grudge against, and it wouldn’t be myself.

She turned to me and asked why I was crying. I didn’t want to answer a question that blindingly stupid, but I thought about the answer as I turned away. I considered it for a few minutes, watching the television without attention, and I tried to pinpoint an exact reason that I was so horribly upset. Was it the change in status quo? Quite possibly. The emptiness of a life without my dearest friends? Again, likely. But that wasn’t all of it - I was certain that I could find just one reason that it hurt so badly. After all, I’d lost pets before, and it hadn’t felt like this. I walked through my memories of the mice, from present backwards, to try and find some sort of reason. I remembered every mundane feeding, every water replacement, each and every time they crawled up my arm and into the curtain of hair at my shoulders. Why had they been so special to me? Before I had them, I wanted them more than I’d ever wanted anything. I spent every free minute imagining them, where I’d put them, how I’d train them, what my future with them would look like. My future. That’s why it hurt, I began to realize.

I spent so much time thinking about my future. A future where I could pull mice from my pockets in front of the school and flawlessly send them into a circus-act. A future where I was never more than a hand’s scoop away from a companion. It was a future that I’d never get to see, not in earnest. Death, something that had previously been such a foreign idea, had come unwound. The end to a future, or the complete lack thereof; something we learn is called death. I put a towel over the tank that night. I dreamt that I removed it and saw both mice running happily in their wheel, and I woke up still believing it. I pulled off the towel and was greeted by a perfectly clean, virtually untouched tank. It’d been set up just the way the mice liked it. There were no mice inside it, of course. How could there be? Why did I let myself believe that they’d be restored? Did I really think that I was immune to tragedy, just because I didn’t want to feel so bad anymore?

I threw the towel back over the tank and picked up a book off my bunk-bed’s ladder. Monday, I’d have to go back to my real life. And then it’d be tuesday, and wednesday, and so on until it’d been a whole horrible week since the 28th. Eventually I put a tiny hamster in the tank, and eventually I stopped feeling a flash of overwhelming anger, regret, something strong and soul crushing, each time something reminded me of them. But I never got over them; I thought I did, but I really, truly didn’t. I remember when the thought first occurred to me, that I might never forget about them, that I might never wake up without wishing they were beside my bed. I was sitting in my challenge class, designing a house on grid paper. I made a layout for it very carefully, three ballroom-sized bedrooms and one massive kitchen, private bathrooms, everything I wanted out of a house in my strangest dreams. I put a spot for the mice right next to my bed. In my fantasies, they would always be there. By the bed, or in a pocket, or preforming tricks to wow even the most skeptical of my classmates. I owed them that much.