I’ve played around with a title for this story and toyed with several options… (Don’t you just love how your language tries to show you that things in Life are best ‘held lightly’, using terms such as ‘played with’ and ‘toy-ed’, even when the topic itself feels serious – this is, after all, the story of my life, and so has a degree of gravity about it – but it’s true that we can tend to be too serious sometimes, and I should know… But there I go, getting ahead of myself again!)
So let me go back and start at least somewhere near a beginning, which, as is often the way don’t you find, is also an ending…
My name is Inca. I don’t currently have a last name – and I believe that can be quite important to you hoomans – but all that might be about to change… Oops, there I go jumping ahead again! Let me start by telling you a little of my history.
I was born 3 and a half years ago, to mixed parentage – one side Collie, the other Dobermann – and I was loved and special to someone. I must’ve been coz they gave me a very beautiful and special name!
But then my life turned upside down! The life I had known came to an abrupt end with all that was familiar to me being suddenly replaced by so much that is new and unknown – and I found myself in this place where I am now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad place, not at all! I’m well fed and I get walked and fussed, but living in a kennel and run, surrounded by strange dogs, and left to my own devices for most of the day, is not something that I’m used to. I’m finding it stressful too, as strangers (2-/4-legged) make me nervous. I never quite know how to interact with them and I get really anxious around them…
The staff here are kind and I’ve grown to really like them, but I can’t quite settle in this place of noise and activity…
But now I can sense that something is about to change again and I don’t know what this is going to mean for me…