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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Messages of Glass

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Anything I write today would just be heartsick. Even if all I wrote was the answer to her text message.

Perhaps the world fell apart at my hands and I am holding on to fragments. Perhaps I'm choking on my own heart. Holding on by my nails and the tips of my fingers as the shards of it all dig into my skin. It happened today, you know. I cut my hand on a yartzheit candle – the ones used to bring light and warmth to a holiday, but that are also used to commemorate the dead. Darling, I lost it long ago.

Perhaps things were made with room to fall apart. Made with space to learn to cook alone, in the dark, because the city shut the lights off but it will still be shabbos. Am I sugar-coating if I say I am still looking for it? That I sometimes find meaning in the sky and a smile and the depths of your words … and that I sometimes scrape it up, with the dust and glass and all, from my knees on the kitchen floor?

I know there is beauty in the way we rise. Strength in the things we bring up from the wreckage with us. Fire to the space between tears and laughter – or perhaps there is fire when you learn to hold both at once.

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