On the day Daniel left, the painting started as a mediocre blob of red acrylic paint on a shoddy piece of canvas. It wasn’t anything in particular, Daniel had said, just a blob. “Will you promise me something?” I asked as I sat up from the splintery old bench at Falls Creek. Daniel extracted the rusty old harmonica that his grandfather had given to him when he was fifteen from his lips and placed it gingerly back in the left-hand pocket of his favorite corduroy pants. He looked at me. “When the blob is finished,” I said, “come back home.” Daniel flashed his familiar toothy grin. “I promise,” he laughed. No one really knew where he was going, because Daniel never told anyone, not even his parents, or his best friend, or even me. But we weren’t surprised when he left. Oklahoma loved Daniel, and he loved it too, but not as much as he loved to wander the open road. By October I had nearly forgotten about Daniel and the blob; school had started back up and it had been three months since I had seen or heard anything about either of the pair. I guess it was rather ironic that he called me on the day that he did. I had been thinking of Daniel that very same evening as I was sprawled on my back gazing up at the tall Oak trees that lined the cemetery by my house. The leaves had just turned from a deep sunflower yellow to a soft rusty orange, the same color that leaped from the strands of Daniel’s unkempt hair when the sun hit just right. I told him this during the hour long conversation that followed after we exchanged salutations for the first time since that day on the bench at Falls Creek. I learned that Daniel was boarding with a pregnant woman named Jacquie in a small town in Kansas. I shrieked when he told me about the category 4 tornado that had ripped through the town, I sang along when he played Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” on his acoustic, and I laughed when he told me about bathing his pet rat, Clementine. “How’s the blob?” I asked when our chuckling had finally subsided. “The blob,” Daniel replied, “is now a mess.” “A mess?” I asked “Yes,” he said, “a mysterious mess of color. Blues, greens, purples, and the most vibrant yellows you could ever imagine. But it’s not anything in particular” “Well, when the mess is finished,” I sighed, a bit exasperated “come back home.” “I promise,” he said with a goodbye. When Christmas came that year I got a letter in the mail postmarked from Chicago. ‘Greetings from the Windy City! (and Daniel, of course),’ it read. The letter was four pages long and animated with details of snowflakes, suitcases, and soft voices of kind strangers. Daniel was now living in a small youth hostel in the heart of the city, and was working as a caretaker for a man named Robert Williams who was paralyzed from the neck down. Daniel was his hands and feet for twelve hours a day. Through his letter, I indirectly met all the quirky characters that were living and interacting Daniel. There was the massive black transvestite named Pink Gregory who volunteered at the hostel, the mysterious woman who always wore her sad eyes on the subway train, and the homeless man on the corner of Fifth and Ceromac who sat on a bucket and sang “God Bless America” over and over and over. At some points during the letter I became fitful with anger and jealousy, often violently throwing the ink-stained pages to the ground. I missed my dear friend, and knowing that these strangers were interacting with Daniel while I could only think of him outraged me. But at the end of the letter, Daniel wrote about the mess. The mess which was now a symbolic photo album, for Daniel had painted a special section of the canvas for each person that he had met along the way, “and a special place right in the middle for you, Sarah,” he scribbled. “And when the photo album is finished, I will come home. I promise.” I received many other letters throughout the next year which were similar to the first, except the dates, the faces, and the cities on the covers of the envelopes had all changed. From Texas to Washington, Kentucky to Tennessee. And what began as a blob, morphed into a mess, and transformed into a photo album, eventually went through the stages of being a timeline, an atlas, a portrait, and a poem. Each infused with pieces and parts of the people Daniel encountered, the places he saw, and the interesting experiences he came upon. And each letter ended the exact same way—with a meaningless promise that after the timeline, the atlas, the portrait, and the poem were complete, Daniel would return home. It’s been about six months since the last letter, and I often think of Daniel, remembering the day he left and trying to remember how that rusted harmonica looked in the left-hand pocket of his favorite corduroy jeans. A sight that was once all too familiar has slowly become foreign to me. But I guess life is like that harmonica, and those jeans, and coming and going, and pregnant women named Jacquie, and transvestites, and homeless men singing “God Bless America,” and everything in between—nothing will ever stay the same. People will come and go. And some friends will become strangers. However, taking what we can from each new face and place is what’s truly important. I learned that from Daniel. And as for the painting, I no longer need to wonder about its progress, because even though Daniel may never come home, I know that what begins as a blob will eventually always end as an autobiography. And that’s a promise I know will be kept. | 
