First Grade

-
“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...
Post a Comment

Breathing Fire

-

Breathing Fire

Recently acquired skill sets:
            Living from a suitcase. (Three suitcases.)
Making myself quite at home in other people’s homes.
Parallel parking. On the sidewalk. In the snow.


I drank a shot of bourbon and heard that living feels like fire.

I know what you mean about feeling fire. There is so much fire burning inside you that you don’t know how to channel. Like you’d breathe fire if you could.

He had the knife to his wrist. To his throat. Look into my eyes. If you’re looking into my eyes, I want to believe you won’t do it.

Why have you chosen this picturesque city, so different from the sprawling freedom of Texas? (The rest of you all have such logical reasons, I pinned a map to the dartboard and shot north of Houston.) Why? Is it enough to say that I chose something different?

Rational friends beg practicalities. Was he dressed to go out? Did he have shoes on? You’re asking the wrong questions. I don’t know anything about his dress, I can only tell you the color of his eyes.

***

I planned for the long term twice in my whole life. Once, in a small-town city where I would have been content to stay forever. Again in a much larger city that had become a home to me for the people in it.

I trusted too much. I fell too hard to tell if I broke something in the landing. (They taught me how to fall, but not like this.) So I jumped instead. I jumped 1500 miles and I’m pretty sure, this time, I landed on my feet.

I planned for the long term. (I was, at this point, working at least two months ahead with flexibility.) You could say I was chased out. Once, by a man with poorly controlled impulses. This time by a man with a knife.

It’s 10 PM and dark and rainy and I have to relearn how to drive in this crazy city. The folk here are artists, brilliantly fitting themselves and their cars in places they logically have no business fitting. My neighbor comes out in his nightclothes. Sweetheart, give me your keys and go back to Texas.

It’s 11 in the morning when I wonder, for the first time, if eye contact is enough to stop a man from dying.

It’s 8:45 and I’m halfway to Houston, on a bus filled with strangers on that long stretch of highway where time loses its meaning and the only songs on the radio are gospel and country. The woman next to me talks epilogues in Spanish, and I browse Zillow listings and wonder what the hell I’m doing.

I don’t know when it was that I decided to come back.

***

I’m a rebel who’s afraid to make a scene, a wanderer who’s roots are firmly rooted in the wind. (When it’s resilience in your head but you’re sure, to the rest of the world it looks like desperation.) I moved here to make an impact, teach you things you’ve never seen and do it all my own way. The brightest candle burns out fastest. I have to remind myself that humans aren’t made of wax.

I've lived in an Airbnb, where I learned to brew incense and park in the city. I moved in with friends for a weekend, running in with a bag of clothes and a bag of groceries. (From sing-alongs to Star Trek, it turned out to be the most amazing two weeks.) I held five different addresses in as many weeks, and kept my eyes pinched closed when I signed my lease.

I don’t think I’ve fallen.

My landlady left me small things. A broom, a garbage can, a roll of toilet paper. My friend laughs at me. You are grateful for a mattress and a trash can. Look how a drastic situation changes your perspective.

Well, one day I will have a house with a yard and white patio and all the books I hid throughout my parents’ home before I left it. In three months or three years or a decade. So what, what then? The journey has always meant more than the destination.

I still marvel like a tourist. The snow through the city still takes my breath away.

Is this breathing fire?

I wanted to do it alone, and prove to myself one motion at a time that I didn’t need someone to save me. (To disprove a lesson I learned years ago: that every person reaches a time in their life from which it is impossible to break out on their own, and they need someone to save them.) I begged kindnesses from strangers, too scared to accept kindnesses from friends. My masks fit me better than my own identity, so I waited for the crowded rooms to throw the masks away.

Here is the lesson I learned now. We connect through our vulnerabilities. I am closest to the people I let help me.

To all those people, thank you. From tea to house keys. Invitations to meals and invitations to spare bedrooms. The friends who carried furniture with me until midnight, the strangers who parked my car for a solid week. The folk who understand these stories.

I believe that words have power. Say something with enough conviction and you can make it true. It will work, she tells me. Alright then, it will.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Perhaps

-
I burnt my coffee this morning and it tastes like travel. Truly. This is the flavor of a flight made by 15 seconds. Of boutique cafés and getting lost at the train station. Of breakfast right out on the fire escape overlooking San Francisco. For the past three days, I have refused to write this. I refused to write about other burning things. What would I say. That I suddenly need herbs to help me sleep. That I let my mind sit in such a web of impatience that it burnt my skin. That I found myself scrubbing the floors clean at one in the morning, on my hands and knees, because there was absolutely no other reasonable thing to do at that hour. They smashed the windows on the avenue where we built a community. (I know home is the people, more than any place.) Dare I complain about the floors, when humans just around the corner are sweeping glass from shattered storefronts where we once shared ice creams, and gathering their livelihoods from the potholes in the streets? Dear Gd, but I see h...
Read more

But in My Heart I'm Jewish

-
I’ll tell you a story. It’s one of those deeper, family stories, but somehow I’ve always wanted to share it with you. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, because her face was bitten by a German Shepherd as a child. Because there was a nurse, Marie, who told her parents that they couldn’t hide harboring a little girl. My mother tells her story best. But I knew my grandma differently. I knew the woman who loved theatre and chocolates and beautiful dresses. I knew that when she passed away, and we drove to New York like we had throughout my childhood, her Manhattan apartment at the heart and height of everything suddenly felt too small to contain even the memories of us. I knew that when I let myself into her bathroom after the funeral to try on one of the abandoned garments, the dress was too small also and the laces snapped, and the hair tie I had braided so meticulously earlier that morning snapped in half a moment later, and I knew she watching. I knew the woman who sat on my bed...
Read more