First Grade

“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...

Windstorm

I had a dream the other night that explained my mind to me.

In the absence of an answer I roam the streets at night, mourning all the things I miss. In the dream it was windy; I must have wandered as far as the river. I do that on occasion.

But in this dream the wind picked up, and I laughed at the notion that it was strong enough to lift me. It’s an old childhood fear, being swept off by the wind. But it did grow strong enough, pulling my feet from beneath me. And even as I reached for the doorway of the nearest building – Chase Bank, if you must know it – even as my fingers brushed against the glass, I laughed at the adventure of it. This would make a clever story. But the wind picked up, sweeping broken beams and wreckage, and the Bank was sealed beneath the lockdown as everything else still is.

The wind swept me sideways, one hand still gripping to the handle of the bank – black plastic – the other clinging to the cracks in concrete pavement. Holding on by my nails and the strength of my fingertips, thinking I could trust my grip against the winds but not knowing how long the storm would rage on for. I only knew what would happen if I released it. I’d be swept up in it all, amidst the billboards and trash and the wreckage, and if the landing didn't kill me I would certainly be shattered by it. Broken in some way that would never heal completely.

And then another version of myself walked toward me. Well dressed, hair wild, stepping so calmly through the windstorm and ruin. She was wearing my red cowboy boots. Unphased, unscathed, mean and haughty. Shoulders back and eyes sardonic.

You foolish creature, her eyes mocked me. What the hell are you doing?


That’s when I woke up, to the image of this version of myself who had learned to walk through it. Who didn’t die a little at the words New normal, or lose more of herself to each discarded mask littering the walkway.

That’s when I pulled out of it. I don’t know if the woman clinging to the doorway learned how to live through it. I don’t know what it means that the one who did was so cold and callous. But I’d needed to see a version of myself who could do it.

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