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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We Are Legendary

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I’m adding Best Buy to that list of places I can never show my face again.

In my (ever more common) sleep-deprived state, I was trying to make a really simple purchase.  (A CD maybe?  A charger for my phone?  Some candy?)  So it was time to pay, and it took about 10 minutes of digging through my wallet and unearthing the following:

  1. An ice-cream rewards card
  2. Some Romanian pocket change
  3. Hotel card keys from Dallas, Budapest, Key Largo
  4. A metro fare card valid in Chicago (and expired)
  5. Another ice-cream card
  6. Etc.
…before I finally dug up something resembling an unexpired credit card valid in this country. 

By this time the cashier was sufficiently frustrated, my sister had long-since stopped pretending that she knows me, and I actually started wondering why I kept so much…STUFF… in my wallet to begin with. 

Have all those months I spent living out of suitcases finally caught up with me?  Do I need to pack up my life’s story to run to the convenience store?

Am I really just that much of a packrat?? 

Or is it something else?

Well now, let’s be honest.  The reason I kept all those things is probably the same reason I wrote about them to begin with.

I want to brag about it.

You know that moment where you lose something for months at a time, and then finally take a trip and realize that the thing you lost (and many other things you didn’t realize that you lost) were actually sitting in your suitcase that whole time?  That you somehow never unpacked them in the first place?

No?  Maybe that’s just me again. 

I want people to know about the places that I’ve been.  I want to keep the memories, and show them off, and be ready for the next time.  I want you to know (along with the cashier at Best Buy) that I have these awesome stories. 

Sometimes, it feels like society wants us to be all the same; wants a prototype and not a person.  Put on your uniform, your work face, and find a way to fit inside that little box that the world carved out for you.  Sometime’s its necessary, sure.  But sometimes you also need to remind (yourself?) and even the crazy world, about your amazing traits as an individual.  Sometimes you just have to go to that convenience store and attempt to purchase chocolate with a European hotel key instead of a credit card. 

So go on.  Brag a little.  Find creative ways to share your stories.

By the way, I found a solution to my suitcase problem.  I just have to take more trips.  Then the items in my bags won’t be lost for months on end…

Let’s meet up somewhere ;)

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