She has her suitcase with her. She is wary of everyone around her because of everything inside the suitcase, and she holds it in her lap on the jostling, sardine-packed bus. She imagines what would happen if someone took it, or, worse, if she dropped it and it fell open in front of all of those strangers. They would see her, almost as clearly as if she stood naked in front of them, and she’d have to shovel her things back into the suitcase and crawl inside and pull the zipper tab around her. Of course the suitcase isn’t bit enough for that so she holds on tighter.

At the train station, she puts the suitcase on the ground on its side and holds her knees close on either side of it, but it juts out into the walkway and one of the other people there almost trips on it and a large woman in a pantsuit glares at her, so she pulls the suitcase in so the back is against bench she’s sitting on and with her calves she holds it up that way. This reminds her of Frida, how she used to love to touch and be touched, and if she thought you weren’t paying enough attention to her she’d weasel her way in between the backs of your legs and the couch, and she’d just stand there like that with your legs pressing her against the couch, wagging her tail which was sticking out from behind one side of your lap and looking up at you with smiling puppy eyes from the other side. She was a good dog, had always been the most loving creature in Darcy’s life, and now she was just another on a long list of things and people who were No Longer Here.

The train comes, finally, and she stands up and picks up her suitcase and walks towards it slowly. The conducter sees her and sticks his head out of the window and says, hurry up girly, and she wants to cry again but she just walks the last couple of feet, gets up on the first step and looks back at the station, and then the she turns around and the door closes and that’s it. She’s gone.

I’m sitting on the bench in front of school with Emilio Estrada and we are talking about our favorite superheroes. Emilio likes Superman, because he flies, but I like Batman, because he reminds me of my father. Dark eyes, dark hair, deep voice.

I swing my legs back and forth as we’re talking, like I’m sitting on a swingset and trying to get higher and faster. Emilio says my father is nothing like Batman, because his skin is too dark and he’s too short. And he doesn’t wear suits.

I wish Papi would hurry up. He is late, again, to take me to soccer practice. He hates it when I call it soccer. He wants me to call it futbol, like they call it back home. But this is home, and I don’t understand what’s the difference.

Papi finally pulls up before Emilio’s older sister, which is good because I hate to be the very last one at school. I climb into the front seat and toss my bag at my feet. Dad grunts hello without taking his eyes off the road, then after a minute tells me to stop kicking the dashboard.

“Aron,” he says, “I’m moving away.”

I can’t move for a second as I try to figure out if this is a joke. But I know my father is not the joking kind. “Papi?”

“It’s not about you, Aron. I need to do this. I need to move home, to Mexico.”

I hold my breath when he says Mexico. Mami would never move back there, and I will never go without her. If he asks me to come with him, I will say no.

But he doesn’t. He just keeps driving.

I have a confession. I can’t stop thinking about Cheesy Blasters.

Thursday’s season premiere of 30 Rock included a nod to the wonderfood. At a fancy Asian fusion restaurant, Jack, Liz, Tracy, and Jenna are served what looks like a slimy bagel dog smothered in cheese. Liz busts out with a jingle about the food. I had trouble finding an embeddable video of the song, but check out the clip here, 20 seconds in. The words are: “You take a hot dog, stuff it with some Jack cheese, fold it in a pizza. You got cheesy blasters! And then all the kids say, Thanks meatcat! And meatcat flies away on his, um, skateboard.”

The jingle itself is super catchy, and the food it refers to is so disgusting I kind of want to try it. So yes, I’ll admit, I watched that section of the show a few times. I was completely enthralled.

And then I realized why I immediately loved the jingle. Liz is referring to what must be a commercial that we’ve never seen and that’s never been referenced on the show before. And yet, it’s so specific and completely fleshed out – come on, meatcat? He flies away on a skateboard? That’s the kind of specific, particular detail that makes stories and characters jump off the page. It’s not that I’m impressed that the writers of the show invented this meatcat character and Cheesy Blasters themselves. It’s that I was so surprised and delighted to see them creating the kinds of details I’m trying to create for my own stories.

The other day it occurred to me that I hadn’t finished a story in a year… a full year… How depressing. So I’ve been writing fiction again lately, not a lot, but some. Just a few stories I’ve started. Trying to start out slow again, ease myself in, just a few pages a week, a vignette when I get a good chunk of time. A full story, the goal for the next couple of weeks.

And I didn’t realize how much I missed it! Watching the words build on the page and the characters flesh out as you go. The details, the smallest things that are so convincing they must be real. Quirks. Stories. Interactions, getting the dialogue just right – I love writing dialogue. The feeling that a sentence, a paragraph, a whole page sits perfectly formed, just waiting for you to write it down.

That’s the way the good stories start for me. An image the builds into an idea that builds into a story, in a moment of clarity and understanding and enlightenment.

I know, I KNOW that I look at the world differently when I’m writing more. I look at the world in a way I want to see it. But even further, I feel more at ease when I’m actively writing. It’s a release, it’s a way for me to explain myself.

I have to write. I am a writer. I don’t have a choice, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Saturday morning, waking up at Adam and Eric’s after a great night out:

Alex: I have such bad eyesight. I can’t even see the clock on the wall. Like, I can’t even tell there’s a clock there.
me: Yeah, my eyes are pretty bad too.
Alex: Thing is mine are only going to get worse. I’m definitely going to have cataracts. My grandpa has cataracts, and my dad has cataracts in both eyes… That’s going to suck.
Eric: I have catapults in both eyes.