Day 18: Blinking | 28 x 20

There were different kinds of aliveness

WELCOME. It’s Day 18. I’m so glad you’re here. Today, we’re vibing with Lynda Barry for inspiration (I do it all the time).

“Paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. Arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.” -Lynda Barry

I.

When I was three or four, a couple of years before my parents split up, we lived in a brown house with a dog named Bandito who we brought back from Mexico. Then we found two stray kittens, one black and one white (ha, symbolism), and took them in. When I was a bit older, by which I mean maybe seven, I asked whatever happened to Bandito and the kittens. My dad, or maybe my mom, told me that one day they just ran away.

For some time, I had this memory of seeing Bandito casually strolling up the driveway one afternoon, the kittens toddling alongside him. They just kept going until they disappeared into the woods, never to return. But when I say I had this memory, what I really mean is that, at some point, I remembered having had that memory, and then I wondered if it was real or a product of my vigorous inner life. It’s pretty romantic, a dog and two kittens up and deciding there had to be a better life out there somewhere. Who had the idea first?

II.

After my parents split, I had two houses that I was shuttled to and from every week. At my dad’s, I had a corner bedroom at the front on the first floor. My bed sat under the window that looked across the long gravel driveway with a full view of the street. When it was dark and I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch the way the moon drifted between the cheap plastic blinds, casting its own light across my wall. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized that the moonlight was in fact the same light that came from the streetlamp on the edge of the sidewalk at the top of the driveway. But there was a whispery comfort in the light, and it felt like the moon, so there were times where I’d forget it wasn’t. As long as you weren’t looking directly out the window, you’d never know the difference. I knew it was the streetlamp, but I decided to believe it was the moon. Even when I’d come home from college, and after I moved to Brooklyn. Even five or six years ago, before the room was made uninhabitable, and my dad was just a little less sick than he was when he died.