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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Sedalia

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This morning I missed a call from Sedalia. There is nothing in Sedalia, I only know it at all because I broke down there, when the train hit a stone. Sedalia is part of a story. It is a red-brick Amtrak kiosk and an hour on the tracks with $3 ketchup packets, and a wonderful view of the countryside.

This morning I dreamed of Tempe. Of a house where I stayed for all of seven hours. Long enough to sleep, to run. To see Arizona’s deserts under a full sun, and a sky so blue it made me dizzy to look at. That was the day I left home. The day I put on corporate clothes and walked into an office with three suitcases and two backpacks beside my presentation, before flying from Phoenix to Philly at two in the morning. It’s funny how life works.

Perhaps this is the great do-over everyone always asks for. The lamenting one does at the end of a lifetime, I should have done this-and-that, should have danced on that rooftop and looked into your eyes and eaten those chocolates with rum in the middle. I should have kissed you. I should have traveled more.

Perhaps in a way this is the ending of a lifetime, complete with its chance to look back on it all. To laugh at what we thought we couldn’t live without, to cry with the memories and hold space in our souls for what is truly important. Perhaps we need time for this all to settle. Time to let our hearts readjust.

Keep it with you. Hold it close. We’ll build what we need around us, and carry that courage back into the world.

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