by Candycane aka Candycane
I discovered my grandfather’s drawing on a Tuesday. By Friday I was drawing too.
I do not think it is a coincidence.
There is something that passes between people. It could be a way of seeing, of being quiet, of taking up a pencil at 3:30 am when everyone else is asleep and allowing your hand to just go where it needs to go.
I never knew this version of him. The young man that studied the bee as if the bee held something significant-something sacred. The young man who wrote sweet little words in the margins of his drawings in fear of saying them aloud. But I think I know him.
I think that he is inside me somehow.
Perhaps inheritance really is not what someone has left you in boxes or in books but what will bloom up from the inside of you, without you realizing it.
He put down the pencil and did not come back to it.
I picked it up.
I do not know if he would recognize my drawings, and I do not think I recognize mine.
But I suspect that he would recognize the feeling-that thing in you that has become so loud, so uncontainable that you cannot help but make it concrete.
Some things exist below language. Below logic.
Maybe, maybe, I’m saying…that…that’s exactly where family exists, too.
Art by Accidental Art, “Were You There“
About the Author
Candycane, known only by a nickname, moves through life like a stranger in a strange world