When people ask what kind of dog you are, I have stopped answering with the catalog of breeds and instead hold up the world you have built around yourself: a small, stubborn architecture of joy, an insistence on the present, a way of standing in a room that says the room will be better for your being in it. You arrived in our lives as a dog and in the intervening year rearranged the furniture of who I am. I thought I was teaching you how to be calm; you were teaching me how to remain so.

We began the year with a plan that was, in its own modest way, audacious. You learned to look where I pointed instead of where the world demanded you look. I learned to speak in fewer words and steadier tones, to measure my impulses before they drove both our hearts into the gutter. Training was supposed to be about you. It turned out to be a mirror.

If the first half of the year was about learning new syllables of calm, the summer rewrote the language entirely. We were uprooted, not by bankruptcy or choice but by the slow, bureaucratic erosion of being in a country where we had no guarantees. Suddenly the ordinary edicts of citizenship, a lease, a steady postal address, felt like promises we did not possess. My PhD tethered me to deadlines and a visa that let me stay and not much else. We found ourselves homeless in the technical sense, and homeless in the existential one: a small, constant ache made of waiting rooms, immigration forms, and the imagined futures that began and ended at the thought of detention.

Those months were among the scariest I have known. I would lie awake thinking of the impossible logistics of your care should something happen to us: who would know the contours of your fear? Who would know you hate head pats yet live for scratches at the base of your tail? Who would say no to handing you into a shelter where labels are easier than stories? The fear was a sleepless fist clenching around the life we had built.

And yet, also in those days, we were rescued, not by law, not by paperwork, but by the human smallness that refuses to be cynical. An angel in the guise of a friend opened her house, then her heart. She became, over a few months of shared dinners and late-night quiet, the family we chose in a foreign town. To someone who has not moved suddenly into another family’s living room, this is difficult to explain: how bone-deep the gratitude is for people who let you be half you and forgive the rest while you stitch yourself back together.

There are, in a year like this, small magic moments that shimmer against the dark. I can still see the way you watch the streetlights through a rain-streaked window, how you tuck your nose into the crook of my arm when the world feels too big, how a single chewy treat, handed at 9:00 at night after a long day, can realign everything. There are the wins that look insignificant to anyone else: quiet morning walks as the neighborhood wakes, carefree hours playing in the park, and runs together that leave us both breathless.

We lost things this year too. Stability, the illusion of control, the carefree arrogance of youthful invulnerability. But for each loss there was a lesson, and for each lesson a gain. I learned to choose my battles, an art as much as a survival technique, and in choosing, to conserve what little courage remains. I learned not to care, at least not as much, about what strangers think of my accent, my clothes, my awkward efforts to fit in. I learned to trust my instincts and, more important, to trust the slow, patient work of habit in both of us.

Your fourth birthday on December 27th felt like an ending and a benediction. We did not throw a parade; there was no confetti falling in the kitchen. We had something quieter: a quiet hike as a family. We lit no candles but in the way you sprawled across my feet and snored after the long hike, there was a liturgy of safety. The year folded into its closing chapter without fireworks, but with a sense of soft repair.

If this were a tidy story, I would tell you that everything has been fixed. It has not. But we have, at least, learned to travel lighter. We carry fewer expectations about permanence and more gratitude for the temporary shelters of human kindness. We have learned the contours of each other’s nervous systems: when to step back, when to offer a treat, how to breathe in unison. Cookie, on your fourth birthday, you remain what you have always been, not merely a dog, but a teacher showing me how to be present, how to forgive, how to insist that a tired person is still loveable. For that, and for the small, incandescent ways you have changed me, I am so grateful.

The year is ending. The seam of it is frayed and bright. I do not know what the next one will demand of us, but I know this: as long as you are at my feet, the courage necessary to try will be within arm’s reach.

With love,

Seda.