First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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The World Is Trying To Tell Me Something

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You know when it just feels like One Of Those Days?

The first thing I did this morning was try to figure out why my alarm was going off at 7:30 on a Saturday (it was Tuesday.) 
I spent the next few minutes trying to go back to sleep.
Until something in my head woke up enough to realize I was late, the buzzing was supposed to be there, and Tuesdays shouldn’t try to disguise themselves as weekends. 

It was thirty degrees (in Houston, of all places!)  Lovely, except my only coat was in the wash.  (So yes, that was me running around in the bright pink marshmallow this morning.  I borrowed it from a sister who probably thinks she’s too old for wearing neon.)

I did make the bus.  I realized as the doors swung open in the freezing rain (and that cloud of whatever the neighbor was smoking) that I’d left my wallet in my other bag.  No money on me.  Zippo.  Nothing to pay the fare.

Yes, the world is definitely hinting at something here.  It sounds like “You shouldn’t go to school today.  You are totally meant to go home and put slippers on and drink chamomile tea or something.”

Too wordy?

Yes, it was one of those days.

It was one of those days where the bus driver let a frantic girl in a bright pink coat ride the bus for free.

It was one of those days where I actually made it to school on time– even on a Tuesday.

It was one of those days where – despite being on a campus where even the vending machines are run by credit card – my friend happened to be holding the exact amount of change I needed to ride home.

So yes.  The world is trying to tell me something.  “It is one of those days.”

Be grateful. 


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