When I was 17, my mother told me that life ended the moment you stopped imagining. I suppose she failed to give this sage advice to my beloved hamster Johannes, for that same year he passed quietly in his sleep. Perhaps Johannes, tired of the view of my bedroom offered by his cage upon the dresser, had simply given up on staring at the plain eggshell walls and gone to Hamster Heaven, a place filed with blue skies, green grass-- not the prickly kind, but the kind that's soft on weary paws and tasty to nibble on-- and fresh newspaper bedding biweekly. Perhaps his indulgent diet and lax exercise regime conspired to finally stop his minuscule heart, or perhaps he was merely old.
In fact, I have no idea how old Johannes was. In retrospect, I realize he could had another family, another life, before he padded into mine.
Before I took him under my wing, Johannes went by a different name. My twin sister had won Peanut Butter at the county fair the summer after eighth grade, and because she had already purchased a non-returnable cage and hamster food, she was allowed to keep him. Provided, of course, that she keep the aforementioned cage clean and remember to feed him and overall ensure that he would enjoy his simple existence to the fullest extent. In the beginning, Mel and I spent hours researching proper hamster care at the library. That was a long, hot summer, and the blessed air conditioning that the librarians constantly blasted incentivized us to hang out between the stacks.  It might not be the grandest in the world, but the public library in Ames, Iowa was certainly large enough to occupy me. Another reader had left a copy of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World on my favorite armchair, and after reading it, I decided I would be exactly like Sophie and swore never to lose my sense of childlike wonder. I noticed that Mel started to slip away to the magazine racks, an area that we had never yet explored and one that I frankly had no interest in visiting.
I was not jealous at all that my sister had a pet and I didn't; even then, I suppose I knew she would forget about him in her quest for shinier, more accessorize-able toys. I just didn't imagine said toy would be Seventeen magazine.
My mother, too, quickly lost interest in my new hamster. She had always been prone to fads, rushing into the coolest new thing only to drop it a few weeks later after realizing talent and persistence—both skills that she lacked—were necessary. In the past six months alone she has tried her hand at kickboxing, pottery, hot yoga and high carb veganism before getting bored and leaving me to finish out the rest of the membership alone. Mel and I have an unspoken agreement to never bring up our mother's lack of commitment, aside from the occasional quips upon finding a half-scrubbed casserole pan deserted in the sink. A short attention span is not Mom's only problem. She has a habit of repeating old quotes as if they were her own, and then taking offense if anyone tried to inform her that Nietzsche or Elvis had said it first. As a child, I would boast to my friends of my "funny" mommy who made me purple eggs and ham for breakfast; that pride turned to shame when I realized she'd ripped the idea off a Dr. Seuss. 
In a way, I depended upon Johannes far more than he ever did me. It doesn't take much to keep a hamster alive: just food, water, and a clean corner of the cage where he can sleep (though he'll probably poop there anyway. Hamsters are not known for a commitment to self-hygiene). I, however, relished the responsibility. I loved the idea that someone at home needed me, and used that excuse regularly with my friends, in an attempt to hide from them that there actually were multiple “someones”. It is socially acceptable for a 15 year old to go straight home after school because she has to feed her hamster, rather than to check her mother hasn't left the stove on again. It's strange that while I adored taking care of this 4 ounce animal, I greatly resented having to watch my mother. They were alike in that neither had asked me to take on the responsibility; my sister had certainly looked the other way in both cases. But all those hours reading taught me that a hero’s power stems from the choices he makes, and while I wanted to make heroic decisions when facing adversaries, the fact of the matter is teenage girls living in the Midwest do not often find themselves in situations where self-sacrifice is even an option. While I was forever tied to my mother by blood laws, I could choose to make Johannes my burden.