There’s a dinosaur that lives out my front door. Some nights she’ll simply stand there to watch me as I watch her. I’ve watched her grow over the last year from a small frail creature to a twenty-five foot long beauty. Her slender neck will stretch above the tree line, silhouetted by the city night light and peer at me with curiosity in her giant disc eyes. On those nights I can feel her move freely, without fear and the earth trembles as if a train is passing mere feet from my porch. Other nights it is impossible to see the shape of her slender, muscular neck above the field. Those nights she moves with as if she were a cat on the prowl. Her presence would go otherwise unnoticed if I had not come to know what it feels like to have her mythical eyes upon me. My skin crawls as I walk along the street, dog leash in one hand, cigarette in the other. I am uncertain if it is me she does not trust, for I have told none of her existence. For she is mine and I am hers.
We exist for each other in this darkest of times. I watch the world come apart around us. The political and economic monsters work their terrible deeds and grow larger while the world is no longer able to sustain their girth. Is it her fear I feel seeded in the pit of my stomach or my own? Is it possible that somehow she is somehow a remnant, a survivor, of the tragedy that laid waste to our planet eons ago? I do not think it so for I have watched her grow from a babe to the beautiful creature she is today. Perhaps there is an ancestral knowledge that has somehow passed through the ages to her. Maybe a genetic trait that allows her to recall the memories of her kin, of the terrible fate they met, and she can sense the world changing around us. The two of us stand still while the world moves on. We are but flesh and bone that remains the same, while the mechanical, the industrial, the technological world continues to expand exponentially. She is the comfort that steadies me when the earth feels as though it will shake and crumble beneath my feet. And I like to think my presence provides her solace as well. For she is mine and I am hers.
Perhaps one day she will approach me. Her powerful legs are more mighty than the oak. The muscles flex beneath her weight and move her forward as she follows me on my nightly jaunts. Her tail sways to the rhythm of the heartbeat of the planet as it balances her form. The long lines of her svelte neck stretch to the sky as she strains to keep me in view when I crest the hill down the street. The cacophony that rises from the city beyond calls to me, yet the world is not what it was, and its change is and is to come is not for me. I return to my place near her as the world moves on without us. My place is with her. Unchanging. Natural. We are a dying breed I decide. We are a reminder to the world of things that were and can never be again. For she is mine and I am hers.
Her head nuzzles my hand as we stand on the hill watching the world below. The city has expanded around us. Our little field is all that is unchanged, all that is still natural. She has grown frail over the years. The foliage and fields that once supplied her massive body with precious calories are no more and she barely has the strength to raise her head from the ground. But she does so to comfort me. Her once supple skin has grown dry over the years as the world dried, all the blessings and offerings of the earth have been stolen greedily by those mechanical creatures below us. There are scabs on her sandpaper hide where she has curled around me to protect me in times of duress. Her skin splits and bleeds and there is no comfort I can give to her. There is nothing that can be done to ease our pain. My companion and I watch in terror at the horrors the mechanicals do to each other. Yet there is nothing we can do. We are cursed to watch this tragedy to its bitter end. But at least we have the company of each other. For she is mine and I am hers.
My dog has long since fallen at our side. The endless energy of her youth faded to nothing more than a weakly wagging tail decades ago. Then her head did not rise from my lap one morning. I stroked her still soft ears and cried, and with me the dinosaur cried. And for a time it seemed that life would come once more to our dying rock. But it is her passing that foretells the coming of the end. The creatures of the earth follow her into oblivion. Over time her bones are bleached white, but not before the mechanical scavengers can pick them clean. If I had the strength I would raise my hand to stop the transgression but as the world dies we die with it. The dinosaur and I wait for our end to come. Finally we understand our fates are intertwined. For she is mine and I am hers.
Her body is so frail now that her cracked and dried skin hangs from her bones loosely. Her ribs show easily on the sides of her once great belly. Her breathing is a labored wheeze without rhythm. The great discs of her eyes are glazing over with film, cataracts make her blind to the world around us. She only stares at me, her head turned sideways in my lap as I stroke her snout. I have tried so many times to cry, to give her something to drink, to moisten her skin if only for a moment, but the mechanical creatures have drained my soul and left me with nothing more to give. She chews on my beard which has grown longer than I am tall and she seems content to merely have something to do. We have long since given up hope that we will survive. The end is nigh and we both wait with patience developed over millennia for its arrival. Her skin is dust blown through my fingers as I grasp at her. The comforting rise and fall of her chest is gone and I am left to watch the end alone. But there is not long to wait. She has sustained me throughout the ages. Without her I cannot survive. For she is mine and I am hers.
