Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 August 2012

One second the spaniel was sitting in the window seat, looking out of the third-floor attic window at the dogs playing in the garden below. The next second she was gone.

Time slows down when things like this happen. I remember looking and her being there, and I remember looking back and wondering where she was. And I remember hearing the yelp as she landed 30 foot down.

In truth, the space between me looking and her not being there and the sound of the yelp can only have been half a second but it felt like a lifetime.

After the yelp, time speeded back up again but I wanted it to slow down. I didn’t ever want to get to that patio. I wandered around the attic room in a daze checking that the door had really been shut and that I hadn’t imagined Cydney being there with me. I thought about how I had left the window ajar because of the heat, and how I had told myself that even in the unlikely event of her deciding to jump all that way she surely wouldn’t get through such a small gap.

And I thought about how much I loved that wriggly little black cocker spaniel and how empty my life was going to be now that she was gone.

As I ran down to the garden, I put my hands instinctively to my face to shield me from the awful sight I was about to see. I called out for help. ‘Cydney’s jumped out the window!’ I wailed, to alert the rest of the people in the house so that they might come running and find her so that I didn’t have to.

My friend’s daughter was on the patio when I reached the French windows.

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