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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Banana Bread and Chaos

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Do you also feel as though the world broke down around us?

I found brown sugar in the freezer and want to bake family recipes. I want to fucking dance barefoot on the rooftops. I want to host a meal and just invite everybody.

It is funny how we gained and lost time all at once. Both at the same time. I am counting down the days with no inkling of what day it is.

And for once in my life wonder if my words aren’t strong enough. But they have to be.

Because if I sit still, I can feel the fabric of the world again. It is turbulent, and shifty, but there is a rhythm to it underneath the chaos.

I don’t know why I decided to see what was possible at 2 in the morning. Too restless to sleep, because it was raining. So instead I learned that laughter is defiant. I learned I still know how to fly, even if I dream of falling.

Don’t cry, my love.

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