Once upon a time, my younger brother was given two hermit crabs for his birthday.
Our grandparents, cailming they’d “done the research” presented them in a small plastic carrying case on a bed of gravel. The two clambered about in their confined space, climbing to the top to cling to the plastic slats in their home’s roof, but soon after quieted down. In their time remaining in this world, they remained just so: quiet, almost motionless pets who were easily forgotten and ignored.
The two crabs died a slow, silent death without a feeling of loss in our young, naïve hearts.
Due to this experience, for quite some time I regarded hermit crabs as boring pets that weren’t worth the space their supposedly small cage would take up. So why, I wonder, was I seized by the sudden urge to have my own?
Now, at sixteen, years after my brother’s crabs had passed on, the idea came from nowhere and stuck.
Perhaps I was seeking responsibility?
Companionship?
Love, even? (I HAD suffered a rather brutal heartbreak recently.)
Whatever it was, last Saturday I drove off to Petco with my dad to discover these tiny, shelled beings that have already changed my life in five days...