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 Taste of Heartbreak

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Today I learned the taste of heartbreak. I learned to calm myself down at two in the morning, when it’s too dark to tell if the pain in my chest is infection or disease or just the wilder emotions that don’t sit well with silence. We don’t talk about the things we miss. That is the first rule. We can say how strange things are, to fill the gap in conversations. If you mention how fast it fell, how quickly it all changed and spiraled beyond recognition, you are walking a tightrope. You’ll receive slanted looks – what you can see of them from above the masks. But you cannot talk about what used to be.

I always break this rule. The first to laugh at the distance, to stare wistfully past windows. I am the first to chase down memories, all the way down to the pier, or the old shul, or the plaza.

I keep finding things I lost in the strangest places. The electric bill was just under the coffee coaster. At the bottom of my bag, the pants I don’t remember packing. So I keep wondering if the rest of it isn’t also here somehow? Isn’t it possible the dinner parties are in the back of the closet behind my winter dresses, just sprinkled with a bit of dust? Will I find weddings in my coffee cups? Reckless dances in those ugly drapes that came with the apartment if I just look hard enough?

This is my tribute to the way it was. My prayer, and my promise that I won’t stop looking for it.

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