We Matter in Someone's Story

By Peter Bowden


Time must stop now. Just for a while. Just long enough for me to gather the threads before they unravel into the noise again. Every time I write like this, I’m sure I’m breaking a dozen invisible laws—the kind written in chalk dust on a school blackboard, next to Newton’s apple and Einstein’s scrawl. But I was never good at science. I was always wondering if trees dreamed or if dogs understood goodbyes.

So let’s begin.

On my desk is a page from a calendar, the kind made to be torn one day at a time, as if life could be measured in paper and paw prints. Jack Russells filled the year, one for each square of morning. But one page stayed. A little brown and white dog stood alone in a field, his face wearing a sorrow only animals seem allowed to show. Beneath him, the caption: “Being left behind is the saddest feeling a dog can have.” And somehow, it was truer than anything I’d learned from a textbook.

They say dogs don’t know time. That a minute or a day—it all blurs into the same burst of joy when you walk through the door. But I don’t believe that anymore. I remember being a boy, the car rumbling down the drive, off to some now forgotten errand, our dog chasing us like a streak of grief and hope. My father would stop, open the door, shout him back. But the dog didn’t understand leaving, only gone. Did he sit there afterward, heart thudding in his chest, wondering why the world had emptied itself of us? Or did the smell of honeysuckle, or the rustle of a squirrel in the trees, patch over the loneliness like a fresh wind across old grass?

And isn’t that us, too? Left behind by something—someone—we loved. The ache flares like a summer sun in the ribs. And then… a sound, a scent, a laugh. We are lifted by distraction, tugged forward like kites in new wind. But the string remains, always, tied to that calendar page we never throw away.

I think about that string often. Invisible, but knotted tight to things we thought we’d let go. A porch light we turned off years ago. A voice we haven’t heard since autumn wore its last gold leaf. A brown and white dog on the porch, waiting for a car. We carry these things in the folds of us, pressed between the pages of the present like dried flowers in a forgotten book.

And when the world grows too loud—when clocks tick like thunder and the future crowds the room—I pull back. I step into stillness, into the hush of a stopped moment. And there I find them again. The dog. The boy I was. My father with one hand on the wheel and the other waving off worry. The sky forever blue in that memory, the kind of blue that belongs only to childhood and old dreams.

Maybe that’s why I keep writing. Why I stop time and trace my way backward. Not to escape, but to remember. To say: You were loved. You were seen. You are still with me, even now. And maybe that’s all any of us want in the end—to know we mattered in someone’s story. Even if that story fits on a single, torn calendar page.

So I’ll leave the page where it’s always been, just off to the side of the lamp where the light can still touch it. Not because I need to remember the sadness, but because it reminds me how deep love can go—to chase after a car, to wait in a field, to write into the silence and hope someone hears. Time will start again, as it always does. But for this moment, it’s enough to sit still, to breathe, and to know that somewhere, someone—or something—once waited for me with joy.

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