There are days when you feel you’ve been given everything you have all over again. This happened once, when I was on the phone with a graduate student. I was sitting in my office and somehow we started talking about how he had lost his leg. I asked him if when he sat up in the street and saw his leg on the other side, if he thought “maybe they can sew it back on.” He said he just thought, ‘What can I do now?’ Then he talked about how with every interaction, he worked to leave the other person with a positive impression, not just of him, but of all black men. I rode my bike home from the university that night on a stream of light, filled with the glowing complexity of beauty.

Today was another day like that. Even before I woke. My dream ended and I was left in the darkness of sleep. The loneliness of the dream lingered, deep in the tissue of my body. I ached in my sleep for hours.
I was fully awake before I realized Scout was lying next to me, that it had been a dream, or more importantly, it had been the heartache after a dream.

All day I loved him.

With none of my petty complaints. We walked the dog. Santo played with Mr. President, running circles around a life-sized latch-hook pony in the art gallery down the street.

I had mate in a garden with Gabriella. We talked briefly of important things. Our dads and our necks and our drawings. She was the maker of both the mate and the garden.

In the afternoon I told parts of this story in a drawing. The letters careen and loop above the hands of a rabbit-girl that I should probably make white tomorrow.

That night, the fashion show was extraordinary. The ladies walked like brown stallions. The people in the front row uncrossed their legs so as not to trip them midstride. I thought about the possibility of trading a small plaster duck for some trousers.

In the evening I added a wheel to the word and rabbit drawing, so that the future could remain unfixed.

And in the bathtub late at night, I wept with the old man in the New Yorker story, who had outlived the son he never knew. He warmed his hands in the morning on a cup of tea.