I have always relied upon writing to save me, to sane me. Organizing what's inside me into neat rows, straight, proceeding from left to right across this vast expanse, black-white, black-white, has simultaneously invigorated and soothed me, this rhythm of the pen, the keyboard. I sat by my dying father's bedside with a pen and a legal pad. This made sense to me.
Drawing did this for me, too. B. was cruel to me in many ways, but we also shared a kindness: a drawing that we made, again and again, kneeling in twin attention beside one another at the scarred coffee table. Always, always, the drawing was: two "V" birds soaring in the sky above a hill with a rising (or setting?) sun, a lump of sun heaped upon a lump of hill; a river or a stream dropping down the hull like a ribbon. a sidewalk doing the same; an apple tree that resembled an Afro on a popsicle stick; and maybe a person. Mine was a little girl in a triangle dress with a tiny pocket, always a pocket.
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