collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative

For the first time in our lives together, I am home and you are hundreds of miles away. Last night, you stayed in a Days Inn in Wichita, Kansas. You’re not the first of those that I’ve called my best friend who went to Wichita. Chrissy pulled me aside in second grade and said, “I’m moving. To Kansas.” I didn’t believe her because she told me things like ‘my parents make one google dollars an hour, but you’ll learn what that means in the fourth grade.’  But by the time the third grade rolled around, she was gone. You’ll be back, though, so long as the new car makes it back through midwestern snows. You’re just a passenger, but you know where you’re going.

 

I’m home baking too many cookies for my or anyone’s own good. If you were here, you’d be at my feet, patiently waiting for mistakes to happen. I’d flick some dough or sprinkle some flour, and you would be there to lap up my mess. You yearn for my mistakes like no other creature in my life. When I make them, you quickly disappear the evidence. We are symbiotic in that way. In other ways, too. You just want to be loved, with my words, with my singing, with my touch. I just want to speak. I make up songs and lose track of the spontaneous lyrics and tones that spill out without thought. I scratch your body and laugh at the faces you make, at the ways the whites of your eyes make you seem entranced, stupefied.

 

We named you for cold things. Donner. You prance like a reindeer, lithe and sleek. 

 

Your adoption coincided with a puppet operetta about the Donner party--a dark story of American history, one that symbolizes the profit-seeking, brutalizing basis of our founding. The singing puppets hit biting conditions. It’s so cold that members of the expedition freeze to death. Their companions eat their bodies to stay alive. You lick at my shoulders after I put on lotion. You nip at David’s hands until he plays with you. But we know that you’d never really devour your companions.

 

When we decided that you’d come to live with us, I thought you were too skinny to cuddle. “We have to accept that we have chosen a non-cuddly dog,” I said. I was wrong.

 

Now we joke that you have come between us, because that’s what you do, wherever we are. On the couch, in our bed. As the old adage goes, what did couples talk about two-thirds of the time before they got a pet? 

 

You burrow under sheets. You writhe and strain until you fit perfectly. It is hard to make the bed with you in it. I make it anyway, burying you under blankets. I think it’s very funny.

 

Sometimes I’m self conscious of how much I love you and how openly I declare it, because I always thought it was most important to direct my love and attention towards people. You are a distraction from all that, from human injustice, from human connection, and I think now I am okay with that. Sometimes I need to be quiet, with you. Only after quiet can I turn my attention back to the difficult human matters that matter to me.

 

You are anything but cold, anything but prickly and angular. I’ll have a kid someday but I’ll already know what it means to take care of a loved one because of you. There is something reassuring about caring for those you love and feeling cared for in return.

 

You unconditionally want to be next to me, accepting the warmth of my body, for no reason except to be in the place where you are most comfortable. To be home. Because of you, I’m home, too.