Dear Somebody: I wouldn’t have without you.

T and Jack, May 2024.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I turn the kitchen light on around 5:45 am. Most days, Jack stirs and watches me while I brush my teeth in the half-bath, careful not to wake our sleeping family. Then he waits by the door and we go out. The past few weeks, he doesn’t move—his sleeping body just rises and falls while I brush my teeth, while I count out vitamins, while I go downstairs for a Peloton ride. I return 30 minutes later, sweaty. His eyes slowly open but he doesn’t move. Let’s go outside, Jackie, I say, and he steps away from me. He retreats, watching me quietly. I feel like a stranger, almost an intruder. Somebody he used to know. 

After some time, I coax him outside. The sky is far more than what I can ordinarily imagine. Over our wooden fence and the neighbors trees and beyond the curves of our busy street, the sun rises eagerly, the fruit of it red and new. Dang, it’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it, Jack-o?, I ask, but when I look for him, he’s already at the door wanting to go back in.

The girls and I go to the library, but when we come home through the back door, T is waiting for us. He sits on the floor with Jack sweetly, the way close friends do—casually, with little inclination towards boundaries or good posture. What he tells me I don’t want to hear, so instead my mind wanders to friendship and how golden it is. Through good friendship, you can transcend your own reality—you have the chance to grow into a person you can one day even admire. I’ve known T for 7 years and his friendship with Jack for just as long. All the cliches about man’s best friend are true: they’re better friends than most, and they try harder, too.

We sit on the porch Saturday morning, me, T, and Jack. It’s a gorgeous Spring day, the morning not warm yet, the trees billowing with post-rain breeze. It’s early enough for quiet. We listen to the robins and grackles, I hear the occasional woodpecker. It’s supposed to be peak cicada season, but I’ve yet to hear or see one. Jack stand with us uncertainly. I think of him snapping at bees, romping around the yard and playing chase. He’s an old man but he still acts like a puppy, we always joked, but now I can’t remember the last time we did. 

I take a photo of Jack and T, his sleek wolf’s shape finally slackened against T’s body, his head in T’s lap. They are handsome together, a softness in each of them that only appears when the other is around. There’s an ease in the way they lean on each other—the way good friends always do.

T holds Jack’s head and I hold his hand. I don’t see either T or Jack, not quite—I only see them, unable to see one without the other. When it happens, it happens quick—but softly, too, like when the sun sinks down at the end of the day. The sky is a blur of rainbow while it goes, and then it’s gone. The sky is a blur, still, and then it is only still, and then there is only you and the sky and no sun.

T looks at Jack and Jack looks at him and I am only a witness to their friendship. How did we get here?, their eyes seem to ask, and in my heart, I know one will always say the same as the other: I wouldn’t have without you.

TUESDAY

How it Feels to Find Yourself was featured in theSkimm’s Best Products to Support Your Mental Health; I am pleased and proud. 

WEDNESDAY

“Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!” 

—from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

THURSDAY

I just finished listening to Lara Love Hardin’s The Many Lives of Mama Love and so greatly admired the way Hardin confronted her own demons. 

I started listening to Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake; I’m reading Under the Tamarind Tree by Nigar Alam; I’m asking myself what kind of artist I want to be.

FRIDAY

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from the hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display 
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it. 
Not until this morning. 

—Grief by Raymond Carver

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Together at last.

From Three Shooting Stars, a tiny comic about the life of an artist. 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

When we board the plane to New Jersey, a switch goes off. I don't know where the switch was, or is, but it must exist because something flips it from ON to OFF. 

I refer to it as The Sea Switch. This switch controls the space between me and N, a swath of distance that rose between us when I crossed the Atlantic for France back in June, and has remained between us for the 8 weeks since. This sea is full of rocky waves. Thrashing storms. A constant swallowing of debris.

When the plane begins taxiing, N‘s eyes open wide. She immediately shuts the window shade and crawls into my lap. I’m wedged into the middle seat, a sleeping stranger to my right, T to my left. N takes my hand in hers and burrows her face into my neck. I’m surprised by the intimacy in her actions: something so traditionally mother-and-child, that for us, has become foreign. Forgotten. I’m so pleased that I ask T to take pictures of us, and he does. 

When I send the photos to my sister later that evening, she tells me I’m beaming, the light shooting out of my face. I study the photos and it’s true: mother and child, in each other’s arms, together at last—even, if only, for a little while.

TUESDAY

"A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” 

––Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

WEDNESDAY

For those wondering if art school is necessary, I enjoyed this series of interviews:

“I think college is important if you want to learn specific skills. But later I prioritized making art — I didn’t go into an M.F.A. program after I got my bachelor’s degree, because I really wanted to think about what I was doing. That’s when I made a U-turn — I stopped taking assignments, decided to make use of what I had learned, went home to Jamaica for a while and began making work about the Caribbean, a marginalized place, but a place of opportunity nonetheless. And that’s what a lot of my work still deals with: Caribbean ecosystems, their issues, what’s beautiful. School taught me to write down my dreams and attack them, that they turn to dust if you don’t.” ––Paul Anthony Smith, from Art School Confidential by Noor Brara

THURSDAY

A simple ink-on-bristol comic titled Three Shooting Stars: Chronicling the Life of an Artist, now up on my blog.

FRIDAY

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

––The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

xo,

M

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