#I'd heard horror stories of people waking up to their Ts submerged as if they'd fallen in and couldn't pull themselves back out

[sysig]

Come back as a flower, spring Baby

Tala took it pretty hard. Makes sense

Hopefully, anyway. Live food that has the opportunity to hide can be hard to keep track of, so it’s possible they were stressed too... But at least that would be something familiar, not a big scary shadow to run away from

Even selfish, childish thoughts deserve a place to be recognized. There’s no utility in piling shame on top of grief

It felt really strange to logically know that they were gone but still believing so hard that I could somehow undo it, that they’d start moving again if I just did the right thing. Death really does strange things to the brain

#Doodles #Spider #Nhandu Chromatus #Tala #Vent #TW animal death #I haven't had a pet all of my own since I was very small - about Tala's age - and this was the first one that I was 100% responsible for #Bought and fed and cleaned and made their enclosure - everything mine for the first time #So it's also the hardest I've ever taken a pet death - at least in the past two decades so it might as well be forever haha #I was blaming myself pretty hard the day I found them - I'd been away for a couple days and when I finally checked they were gone #Gave me the kind of vibe of someone who's so alone that no one finds their body until [x reason] - as if no one cared enough to look #But mostly I felt bad because it looked like they had attempted a molt but hadn't even flipped over #Like they'd just given up - like they knew that it wasn't even worth putting in the effort #I think now that I've looked it up I know what happened - spiders get a lot of their fluid intake from their prey #And because they'd been in premolt they'd been refusing food - and while I spritz their enclosure it's not a very reliable water source #I'd been wanting to wait until they were a bit bigger before I put in a water dish because I was very paranoid about them drowning #I'd heard horror stories of people waking up to their Ts submerged as if they'd fallen in and couldn't pull themselves back out #I hadn't considered that the opposite was even a possibility - that was my mistake and I feel guilty about it #But it is at least the minorest of comforts to know it wasn't a lack of space to molt - maybe - that killed them #I still want to ask seasoned spider people but it hurts to think about telling them what happened #It didn't feel real at first. It took a while for it to sink in and the entire time I just kept waiting for them to move again #I really didn't want the first time holding them to be to bury them #I could think selfishly and hope that they were a male after all - that they wouldn't've had very long #But they should've been here for years #I really wanted to do better by them #In some ways it feels silly to cry so much over a spider haha but I really wanted to do right by them and to not be able to...