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

Don’t Let ‘em Get You, Dear Digital Childhood

-

We had no childhood, it was all digital, all fake and subject to subjective views and Facebook likes, here one day and gone the next but no bruised knees and no memories. We had no childhood (why are we unhappy adults?).

Sit the child down and give him a screen to play with. It’s sunny outside, there are so many choices. These games keep him quiet, he will sit still for hours. (Why is he jittery and hyper and unable to focus in school?) There must be something wrong with him. Off he goes to the clinic. Your child wants to move around and run during the immobile times? He must be diagnosed, we’ll put him on drugs to sedate that need out of him. (Why is he overweight?)

He is a teenager now, out with his friends. He has a phone that he answers whenever it rings. Such a good boy. He had practice as a child, living through a screen. He must be happy. I know he is happy, he is smiling in all of his Instagram photos. They use emojis, isn’t that great? (Why don’t we have any meaningful relationships?)

He is a working professional. See his suit, it’s the latest, the magazines say so. 60 hours a week, because the 50 hour workweek wasn’t enough, and the 40 before that. It’s 30-something in New Zealand and children go to school barefoot. (Why are they happier?) How are they happy without all these billboards? Without our personalized email ads telling us what we need to buy to make us happy, so that in two weeks they can tell us that the thing we bought is no longer good enough? That’s okay, here’s the latest.

The Joneses were miserable, does nobody see that?

We remember the suits but we forget the faces. We were walking uniforms, whether it be business blazers or How Can I Help You convenience store aprons. We were substantial, now we are less. We are reduced to the words of a feeble text message, and we call it friendship.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 d...
Read more

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