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 Shut Down and Life Got Crazy

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And the world shut down and life got crazy, all at once a movie where we missed the beginning and the writers are on acid.

I had a dream last night that we were racing toward wishes. And in the dream I kept saying, “I had everything I’d ever wanted.” I had everything I’d ever wanted. I cried in the dream and I woke up crying, and if I say those words to myself I will stop everything and cry even still.

Be strong, be strong, be strong.

Amidst all the 𝑡𝑟𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 and 𝑎𝑏𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛s. Don’t you know I hate it all. Don’t you know you can’t live your life on a screen. Be strong.

I knew it then. I knew what a gift it was.

Be strong amidst the empty shelves at the grocery store, strong amidst the knowledge that only G-d knows how long this goes on for.

Were do we stand now? We wash our hands so much they bleed. The news floods us with nothing but news of uncertainty. Well, here is what I know.

My life changes in a moment. A new hometown, a new beginning. I have packed up in an instant. People make your life; they betray you or love you or give you keys to their houses with pancakes for breakfast. I learned to keep myself rooted in tradition. But now they’ve closed the shuls, and how does one cope with the changes that happen too quickly? One moment here, one moment this, one million things spinning online and who knows what is real or for how long it will last us. How can you say, Hold my hand, I’ll stand with you, when even that bare proximity is forbidden?

It’s suddenly all gray space. Riding the winds when the ground is too unstable to hold me.

Intrinsically, yes, the desire to fight back. The desire to know all of it, the desire to not hear everything through the cracks in conversations.

I see things in people’s eyes that they don’t know they say. I am not afraid to cry while someone holds me. That doesn’t work on screen. So the things we have, they must mean something different. There is such beauty in the smile on his face when he sees me. Words so profound they weep. They have to, after all. Today our words must speak with all the force of an embrace, the power to relay what our eyes are really saying.

We do what we have always done in times of crisis. We scrape together what we can. We cobble moments from the threadbare fragments. We build and rebuild, and we say to each other, 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑚𝑒. We say it to lovers and we say it to strangers but not once, since the world fell, have we said it without meaning. I want so much to take this energy, channeled all week through crisis management and damage control, and use it to build something beautiful with you. Something marvelous. By G-D.

It’s suddenly all gray space, and that is the best time for changing. For forging. You are so damn strong, my darling. Stand and build it here beside me.


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