The Heart of an Abandoned Dog

 "It can well be said that life is an episode that comes to uselessly disturb nothingness." A. Schopenhauer.

After 4 years in jail, 38 countries visited, 198 lovers, 12 different jobs, and after the many lives I have lived without even dying, I finally understood what I have been searching for in this world since I was born 67 years ago.

At last, I understood why, in my first relationship, I tolerated the infidelity (or infidelities) of my first girlfriend until she took pity on my miserable soul and decided to break up with me to end my suffering.

I also finally understood why I went through a phase where it was very easy for me to conquer a new girl every weekend, and yet I was never able to build a relationship longer than two weeks.

I also discovered the reason why my soul had to give me a different personality every few years. God, if anyone could see where I am now and what my past was, they would think they were witnessing the lives of 10 different people. In reality, it was just me trying to adapt to get something my being was unconsciously searching for.

The 3 weeks with Maria in the Philippines and the end of the relationship when I said "I love you."

The 2 months in Panama when I learned to dance and used that to be with a different girl each month.

The 6 months in India where, while trying to learn "yoga" to calm my spirit, I ended up (unintentionally) having sex every weekend with pretentious tourists who said they wanted to "find themselves."

The 9 or 10 months in Europe that I barely remember since I was always under the influence of some new synthetic drug.

Every action of my life was motivated by something my soul was persistently seeking without being aware of it.

All my mistakes.

All my travels.

All the drugs.

All the parties.

All the truths and lies.

My life was defined by the constant search for one single thing.

Love.

Now that I am at the end of my days, I have tried to tame my spirit and reflect on the disaster of a life I have had.

I have just discovered, while having a beer in a fancy bar in Spain, why I have been the fool I have been for as long as I can remember.

I have the heart of an abandoned dog.

And it is no one’s fault, and it is not that I haven’t received love.

An abandoned dog, once it finds someone who feeds it at least once, will follow that person faithfully. With passion, from a place of need. As if that person were God. As if they were the only one who could feed them. As if their world would end if that person decided one day to leave them in abandonment again.

That dog would be willing to do anything to avoid being alone again.

That dog would learn tricks to entertain the reason for its existence.

It would faithfully follow that human to the end of the world.

And once abandoned, that dog would think it could never find someone like that again, and as a consequence, it wouldn’t eat again, slowly fading away until, in its final moments before starving to death, it vividly and melancholically recalls every moment it was happy and every instant it felt that life was a piece of crap.

This dog sometimes gets a scrap of food thrown at it by a stranger. This food, however, despite satisfying its hunger a little, only extends its agony and makes it crave more and more.

The abandoned dog will have the permanent illusion that each stranger who gives it a little food will be with it for life. However, it always discovers that loneliness and hunger will be its only constants.

And when its heart is about to stop beating, a breadcrumb extends its life by a few more seconds, prolonging its suffering.

This has been my life.

Feeling loved and giving love have been the drugs that have messed up my life the most.

Now that, after so many falls, I can rationalize better, it seems crazy to me how I or any human can reach the point of feeling the need for love as strongly as hunger and thirst.

Could it be that we, as human beings, are the only creatures who complicate life with something we don’t really need to live?

Is love really necessary for human existence?

These are the kind of corny things one asks after ending a relationship. For me, however, at this moment when I have no money in the bank and also don’t know where I will sleep, this question has become the philosophical issue that defines and explains my life.

It is about making the irrational rational.

In the search for love, the most irrational part of my being took control of my life and led me to places that not even God would visit. Inside, my consciousness would occasionally wake up in those moments and wonder how the hell we ended up in the worst neighborhood of some Latin American country just to have sex with a girl I had met two hours earlier.

Seen from this point of view, love and all other feelings seem like whims of consciousness. And yet, the lack of affection felt like a dog that hadn’t eaten for a week: my heart couldn’t tolerate loneliness.

Maybe if our feelings were only tied to the idea of survival like other animals, we would have already conquered the entire galaxy and even colonized other planets.

But here we are, distracted, thinking about how to manage to sleep with the same person forever.

We fantasize about having the thrill of the first kiss every day.

And we dream of having our hearts ignited with love for someone equally willing to enjoy even the smallest moment with us.

How many things would humanity not have conquered if it weren’t because a hug and a kiss always motivate us more than survival?

Today I am without a home, without friends, without family, and with my seventh new identity freshly created.

And perhaps, if it weren’t because love became a primitive need for me, I would be in my mansion worrying about where to park the new Ferrari I would have bought after the success of my fifth business.

The difference between who I am and who I could have been is love.

I am sure that the version of myself in another universe, the one who kept their feelings under control, is right now flying in their private jet to a business meeting with some Arabs in Dubai.

However, the story of my universe, this one in which I am drunk thinking about my existence, is just that of a poor bastard who should have died years ago after all the stupid things he did in search of affection.

And it’s that every time I felt death approaching, the kiss of some stranger would give me hope and make me feel that life was worth living. The "I love yous," the hugs, the dates in the park, and the sunsets when I held hands with whom I believed was the love of my life at that moment, all these things became for me the drug that would motivate me to seek world peace if necessary just to feel loved.

And so, like any drug, the absence of love meant the greatest of crises. Like any addict, I did the unthinkable just to feel that someone loved me.

Today I understand, however, that there was nothing I could do to stop this need.

It even seems futile to think of making philosophy out of something as powerful, senseless, beautiful, and harmful as love.

For as much as I have reflected on it tonight, my rationality knows it could never tame the feelings that made my heart take control of my life.

And maybe this is not a tragedy.

Perhaps the fact that my heart was uncontrollable is part of the rawest part of our human nature.

Probably, what defines us as humans is that we always need someone else to give life to what seems to give purpose to our existence: Love.

Surely, without love, life would be less complicated. But if love defines us as humans, is it worth living a life without it?

It is our essence.

We are because we love.

Without love, everything we have built as humanity, for better or worse, would not exist.

The Taj Mahal exists because of love.

Because of love (or the absence of it), we seek to become millionaires to feel loved, despite the falseness that comes with such love.

Thanks to love, some family man wakes up at 6 in the morning to go to work to feed his wife and children.

Because of love, some wretch just took his own life on some bridge after a divorce.

The cruelest and noblest things in life have a common cause: The relentless search of the human spirit for the calm that comes from feeling loved.

And despite everything, I regret nothing.

Because I remember with emotion every word, every kiss, every dance with each of the people who were, at their moment, the love of my life. And I had about 50 stories like that.

Am I a failure for letting my soul search tirelessly for what seemed to make it happy?

If any of those pretentious people with stable lives look at my life with disdain, it is because they were cowards who achieved their peace by denying the wildest part of their humanity.

And the wildest part of our humanity is truly that vulnerability in which we admit with our actions that all we want is love.

And even after this revelation I’ve had in my mind, my heart will remain deaf to my brain’s advice. I am still that abandoned dog trying to satisfy that need that gives purpose to its existence.

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Pedro, after finishing his beer, paid with the last coins he had in his pocket. Tomorrow he has an interview for a new job. He was excited, as it seems this opportunity would allow him to buy new clothes he could use at the social dances in Madrid.

Pedro wanted to impress the future love of his life, even though he had been sleeping on the street for a week.

In the bar's speakers, cha-cha-cha, the favorite music genre of this adventurous man, started playing. Pedro closed his eyes and began to hum the song's lyrics.

With his eyes closed, Pedro felt a soft and delicate hand on his leg. It was a foreign girl who had seen him dance earlier that night. Perhaps neither of them would find the words to communicate due to the language barrier, but it only took this girl’s hand in the air to understand that both of them, that night, had the same desire.

The calm of physical contact.

The harmony of a moving embrace.

The possibility of a first conversation.

The excitement of a potential night together.

The anticipation of what could perhaps be the beginning of the most beautiful love story the world has ever seen.

At least, these were the scenarios in Pedro's head as he danced with the girl as if it were the last time he would ever dance in his life.