A golden day
is waiting.

Why this game exists

I made this out of something I had been avoiding.

Gomi is eleven now. She is a Yorkshire terrier, about eleven pounds, and most of this site is practical writing about that part of her life — the eyes that need drops every day, the stairs that got harder, the small changes that turn out to mean something. Useful things, for people in the middle of the same thing.

This page is not that, so I should just say what it is.

I built it because of a feeling I had been carrying around for a long time without looking at directly: that I could have spent those eleven years better than I did. Not badly. Just that a great many ordinary days were allowed to pass as ordinary days. You cannot go back and walk them again, and there is no honest way to talk yourself out of that. So I made forty-five seconds where you can walk beside the small version of her, and put the real photograph at the end. Three days after she came home.

It isn't only about looking backwards, though — that would be a sad little thing to build. It is closer to a promise. The dog in that photograph is asleep on the sofa behind me as I write this, eleven years old, and the years I still have with her are the part I can actually do something about. Making this was how I said that to myself in a way I would not be able to ignore afterwards.

And if you found this page after your dog is already gone, I hope it is alright to say that I made it partly for you. There is nothing here to sign up for and nothing to buy. Only this: the days you are now adding up and calling "not enough" were almost certainly more than you are giving yourself credit for. Dogs do not keep that kind of ledger. We do, and we keep it badly, and we always weigh it against ourselves.

The line on the end screen is the whole of what I believe about any of it. Some golden moments arrive late, and they still count. The eleven-year-old who needs a hand onto the sofa is having golden days right now. They just don't photograph as easily as a three-day-old puppy does.

If your dog is still here and something has started to change, the rest of the site is where the useful writing lives.