NSFW🔞 Single•59•Introvert• Socially awkward•Don't be a dick just #bekind Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes 🫶🏼 Will probably like your dog more than you 🐾
An Introvert’s Dream Day
- Waking up naturally, no alarm
- Slow morning with coffee or tea
- Nothing on the calendar
- Favorite cozy outfit
- Time alone to recharge
- Peace, quiet, and no small talk
The volunteer warned her three times before she even reached his kennel: "Don't get your hopes up with this one. He's been returned four times. Something's just… off about him. People bring him back within a week." But Karen had only come to walk dogs that Saturday — she wasn't adopting anything — so she figured a brindle mutt nobody wanted was as good a dog as any to take around the block, and she had no idea she was about to lose an argument with an animal who had already made up his mind. His name on the kennel card was Buster, crossed out and rewritten three times in three different handwritings. Four returns in two years. The notes were a quiet little tragedy: Too anxious. Won't settle. Cries when left alone. Not a good fit. Each family had brought him back a little more shut down than the last. He was the kind of dog shelters lose sleep over — not aggressive, not sick, just somehow always the one handed back. By the time Karen clipped the leash on, he wouldn't even look at her. He walked beside her like a dog who had learned that walks end in goodbyes. But something happened on that loop around the block. He started glancing up at her. By the halfway point he was leaning into her leg at every stop. And when she brought him back to the shelter and bent to unclip the leash, Buster did something he had never done in two years of returns. He sat down on her feet. And he would not move. The volunteer tried to coax him back into the kennel. He pressed harder against Karen's legs. When she crouched to say goodbye, he climbed half into her lap and pushed his head under her chin and let out a low whine that sounded, to everyone standing there, exactly like please. "He's never done that," the volunteer said quietly. "Not once." Karen had walked in that morning wanting nothing but a few hours of fresh air and a dog on a leash. She knelt on that concrete floor with a dog who had been given back four times refusing to let go of her, and she felt something in her chest simply give way. "Okay," she whispered into his fur, half-laughing, half-crying. "Okay. You win. I'm not going anywhere either." She filled out the paperwork that afternoon. Buster never spent another night in a kennel. And the dog who "wouldn't settle" for four families slept soundly the very first night — because, his whole body seemed to say, he'd finally found the one who wasn't going to bring him back.