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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November 3rd

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It wasn’t a clean cut, and it isn’t a clean scar. I was going to change my life. You changed my life in a moment.

I was never able to write these all at once. A thought at a time, a poem carved out through weeks of running in the rain. But this one had to be today.

I fell hard. I rose up, to more than I was before, more than I ever could have been had I gone where you wanted. You forced me to rise up like this.

I denied my friend, when they insisted on anniversaries to mark traumatic things. Traumaversaries. We believe that our holidays resonate with the power of their instigation, that they hold a special place in time accessible to us each time of that year. For decades. For centuries. Don’t do it, I tell my friend. Don’t give this that kind of power.

I don’t forgive you. I don’t need to. But, like my sister said so many months ago, the scars are something I would choose to wear now. A lot of us have scars like these, from people like you. Most of us don’t show them, so most of us don’t know how unified we can be.

See, they don’t define me. By embracing them, they have stopped defining me. I don’t cry in corners. I don’t see forgiving you as the price to pay for healing.

Today is November 3rd. I talked a big game.

I’ll get over what you did. Yes, I can still feel it everywhere you touched me. I have scarred myself in so many other places, trying to carve out the unseen scars you left. It didn’t work, in the end. I think I caused more scars than you did.

Most people don’t believe me, when I tell them I don’t care about that. I don’t care about what you did, not nearly as much as I care about the repercussions. About what it cost me. About who it cost me. Would that you had been a stranger. Would that your impulsive actions not stolen my relationships with the people who were close to me – people with nothing in the world to do with what you did. People who probably, to this day, don’t even know what happened.

And one person who does. But that’s a separate conversation.

I dreamt I called that person last night. I listed off each reason I had wanted to call for so many weeks already. A memory. A shooting. I listed off each milestone, in my life and theirs. They told me things were hard. I told them I could have helped them.

I woke up forgetting it had been a dream.

I do believe in the power an event holds in time. Birthdays, marriages, even death…there is a reason that we mark so many different kinds of anniversaries. I woke up determined to do something monumental on this specific day, to let it be remembered for different reasons. Better reasons. I had bourbon with breakfast. I wanted to toast it, but couldn’t find the words to summarize this concept.

It is November 3rd, and I am walking through the streets empowered. Yes, it has been a year, and that year is my yardstick. Look how far I’ve come.

I was wrong, when I told my friend to erase it. To not bind themself, every single year, to that kind of anniversary. I was wrong when I thought the answer was defiance, a few rebellious words to will it all away.

Look how far you’ve come. Every single year, if you choose to do that. Look how far you’ve come.




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