He Has A Face

Can you see it?

In 2003, we were still finding our Midwest footing.

We were water people trying to translate ourselves inland. California gave us beaches and salt air. Arizona gave us Havasu. My family always orbited water somehow, like we’d die a little without something reflective nearby. So in the quaintness of Quapaw, Oklahoma, we found Blue Hole.

I assure you, it was not blue.

It was murky and strange and wonderfully alive in the way rural swimming holes always are. Slick rocks. Humid air. Cigarette smoke drifting through trees. Blacky tearing through the landscape like a cryptid escaped from a Walmart parking lot.

And somewhere in the middle of that ordinary afternoon, my mother spotted a rock.

She bent down immediately and yelled, “Oh my God, Cortni! He has a face! He’s sticking his tongue out!”

She handed him to me like this was now somehow my responsibility.

Most people would’ve laughed for a second and tossed the thing back into the dirt. But I refused to put him down. Rufus was mine before he even had a name.

I don’t remember how I landed on Rufus. I only remember that it took weeks. I carried him around mentally before I carried him around physically, trying names against him like sweaters that didn’t fit quite right. And then one day, somehow, he was Rufus. Completely and undeniably Rufus.

After that, there was no separating us.

He came home with me and quietly followed me through every version of my life afterward. Every move. Every reinvention. Every collapse and reconstruction adulthood hurled at me.

Pictures vanished in moves. Figurines broke or got left behind. Dolls from my grandmother disappeared somewhere between one unstable season and the next. Whole eras of my life dissolved into missing boxes and memories I can only partially reconstruct now.

That’s the thing about living through enough upheaval. Your history starts eroding at the edges.

But somehow, Rufus remained.

And every single time I had to put him into a moving box, I felt guilty. A tiny sting in my chest like betrayal. Because everything I packed had a way of disappearing eventually, and I was always terrified that one day I’d open the boxes and he wouldn’t be there anymore either.

But then there’d come a moment.

The unpacking moment.

The moment where life had stabilized just enough for me to start placing things instead of fleeing with them.

I’d cut open the box, move things aside, and there he’d be. Face tilted upward. Tongue still sticking out. Rufus.

And every single time, I felt safe again.

If Rufus was back on a shelf somewhere, it meant I had managed, once again, to build enough stability for him to witness it.