2007
March
My freshman year at Cornell was not a good one. By March, I was feeling very depressed. I was struggling badly with school work and no one seemed to care. I was just one in a class of five-hundred, so what did the professors care? I was also struggling to make friends. My roommates and I didn’t get along well and I never saw the few friends I had from my old dorm. I didn’t go to parties anymore because Thomas got mad at me when I went to one the first semester. “You’ll get drunk and cheat on me,” he had said. I told him he was being ridiculous and I went to the party anyway. It was a blast and, of course, l didn’t cheat on him even though I did get drunk. But he was so furious at me for going that it wasn’t worth going to more parties.
“I can’t believe you went to that party when I told you I didn’t want you to go,” he said.
“Thomas, nothing happened!”
“Not this time, but if you keep going to parties and getting drunk, you’re going to cheat on me one of these times.”
I tried joining the rugby team to make friends. It was tons of fun, but it was just too much of a commitment. After failing a few midterm exams, I decided it was time to put all my time and energy into hitting the books. Just when I was starting to really fall into a depression, my mother called me one night while I was attempting to learn something about organic chemistry.
“Melinda, Hobbes isn’t doing well.” Hobbes was one of my oxen. He and my other ox, Calvin, had been my two best friends since I got them when I was eleven. Yeah, they were animals, not humans, but having been raised around cows, I seemed to relate to them better. Hobbes had been suffering from severe arthritis the past couple months and this wasn’t the first time my mother and I had a conversation about his illness.
“Well, can Dad give him some medicine or something?” I asked.
“There’s really nothing we can do. He is having a really hard time getting around, Melinda. I think it’s best if we put him down.”
“No, Mum, please!”
“It’s your decision, Melinda, but you need to think about Hobbes. He is just suffering. He isn’t happy.” I had been thinking about this a lot the past few months, but avoiding making a decision. I didn’t want to lose Hobbes, but I didn’t want him to be in pain, either. It had made me cry just to watch Hobbes walk the last time I saw him. I couldn’t bear to think how he must look and feel now if he had gotten worse. It was selfish of me to keep him in pain so that I wouldn’t have to be.
“Okay,” I said. I hated myself immediately for saying that one word.
“You’re doing the right thing, Melinda; he’ll be much happier.” There was a short pause before she went on. “What do you want to do about Calvin? Tim says oxen don’t do well without their teamster, they get very depressed. You may want to think about putting him down as well.” Tim was our good friend and neighbor who had a lot of experience working with oxen and he often gave me advice on mine.
“No! He is perfectly healthy and I can’t handle losing both of them.”
“Okay, we’ll keep him then.” I don’t remember what the rest of our conversation was about, but I ended it quickly because of the massive tears forming in my eyes. I immediately called Thomas, crying heavily into the phone. He tried his best to comfort me, but there really wasn’t much he could do.
Hobbes was taken away on a Wednesday. I was devastated that I didn’t get to say good-bye since I was in Ithaca, but part of me was happy I wasn’t there. I knew if I had been, I wouldn’t be able to let him go. Would Hobbes be mad at me for the path I’d chosen for him? Calvin would surely hate me. I wanted what was best for Hobbes, but how was death the best choice? I moped around for weeks before my mother called again.
“Melinda, there’s something I have to tell you.” I wanted her to say that they decided to keep Hobbes, that he had magically gotten better and was feeling just fine, and that I’d see him when I came home for spring break in a few weeks. But she didn’t.
“We decided to put Calvin down, too. He was shipped with Hobbes. I wasn’t going to tell you, but Samantha made me. She said you’d want to know.”
Samantha was right, I did want to know, but I certainly did not want to hear it. So many emotions washed over me that I was numb for what felt like hours. My face got hot with anger and tears swelled up in my eyes.
“You did WHAT? I told you I wanted to keep Calvin! You said you would! And then you didn’t tell me?! As if I wouldn’t notice he was gone?”
“Melinda, he would have been so depressed without Hobbes he wouldn’t have been able to live.”
“I’m depressed about it, too, does that mean you’re going to put me down as well?!” I retorted. My mother, God bless her heart, tried her best to make me see the reasoning and make me feel better, but she just couldn’t do it. Not then. I hung up with her and sobbed into my pillow for hours. Eventually, I called Thomas, but he was little help. I just wanted to cry on someone’s shoulder, but I had nobody.
I wallowed for days. I didn’t get dressed or go to class. I just laid in bed all day like a corpse, thinking about Calvin and Hobbes and how their deaths were my fault. I needed a change. I had to get away from this place and go where I could be around someone who would be there for me. I needed my Thomas.
“Why don’t you take some time off from school and come live with me in Washington?” Thomas suggested one day.
“I don’t know about that. As much as I want to live with you, taking a whole semester off from Cornell doesn’t sound like a good idea. I will fall behind and may not graduate on time.” Like always, he had a solution for everything.
“There are plenty of schools out here. You can take classes here, get a job, and we can have an apartment together.” It did sound amazing. I had been out to Washington once when Thomas first got back from Iraq last October and I absolutely fell in love with the place. The idea of actually living with my fiancé, instead of having our continuous long-distance relationship, seemed too good to be true. But it could be true; I just had to make it happen. So, despite my family’s fervent attempts to get me to change my mind, I filled out my leave of absence paperwork. 