My best friend, full stop ♡

Why she gets her own page

Every other page on this site is about a thing I do. Code I write, servers I run, a Discord bot I keep expanding, a body of writing I've built up over time. This one is about a creature who doesn't care about a single bit of that and loves me anyway. Harley doesn't know what Hazel is. Why would she? She doesn't know I'm autistic, or that I spent all weekend deleting a thirty-second task from my life, or that any of the words on the rest of this site exist. She knows the sound of my footsteps. She knows when it's time for a walk. She knows I come back. That's the whole relationship, and somehow it's enough to make her the calmest, least complicated love I have.

I already introduced her on the About page as "my shadow, my road-trip buddy, and my daily reminder to go outside and touch grass." That's all still true. This page exists because a single paragraph stopped being enough room.

What she actually does for me

My days have a shape, and a lot of that shape is Harley's. Mornings start with a walk somewhere between 7 and 10, there's a midday one around noon to 2, an afternoon one around 4, and a last one somewhere between 9 and 11 at night. Nobody imposed that on me. It also has nothing to do with discipline, and I want that said plainly, because I've never once held a schedule together for my own sake. My whole day quietly reorganizes itself around her. She needs it, and if I'm honest with myself I need it about as much. Autistic and ADHD brains aren't always great at noticing "I have been sitting in the same position hyperfocused on a problem for four hours and my body has needs." Harley doesn't care about my hyperfocus. She will interrupt it, every time, and she is right to.

She's also just there, in the low-key, unglamorous way that ends up mattering most. She doesn't need me regulated, or presentable, or finished processing something before she'll come sit next to me. She's the constant in a life that otherwise runs on a lot of moving parts: partners, a Discord community, Hazel, Hilray, and a website that apparently never stops growing. Harley is the one relationship I have with zero dependencies and no deploy steps. She needs food, walks, and me being in the room. What she gives back for that's steadier than anything else I've got.

My Instagram bio has listed her, for a while now, as "German Shepherd Assistant Manager In Training." It's a joke. She has never once reviewed a pull request. It's also the most accurate job title I have ever written for anybody, because she does supervise. She turns up in the office doorway at roughly the hour I should have stopped working and stands there until I acknowledge her. The "in training" part is only because she hasn't yet worked out that she isn't the one in charge. She is the one in charge. I noticed much later that I added that line in the same edit where I first called myself a trans girl in public, so the two truest things about my life that spring went up in the same breath. One of them terrifying. One of them a dog.

Family, not a pet

I mean that literally, not as a cute turn of phrase. When people ask about my family, she's part of the answer. When I talk about who I love, she's on that list without an asterisk explaining that dogs "don't really count." She eats better than some humans I know (Acana Red, for the record, because I did the research and she deserves the good stuff). She has her own stuffie. She has strong opinions about which walk route is correct. Does any of that make her less family? If anything it's exactly what family looks like from the inside: specific, a little ridiculous, and non-negotiable.

The gallery

What was she thinking in any of these? No idea, and I'm not writing captions that pretend otherwise. She's extremely photogenic and I have the phone storage to prove it.