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...
Post a Comment

The Echoes Letters Left

-
Here is a picture of my schedule from before the world ended. It’s been on my fridge almost a year, beside a wedding invitation and that photo of my friends from Texas. A testament to the things I’d 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑙𝑑 one moment at a time, to the knowledge that I had a place here in this city that I chose, a place I forged.

Even after the world closed around us I couldn’t take it down. I squeezed phone interviews beneath the names of my students. Wrote Zoom schedules between the lines. I spent months scribbling new fragments in the space between old Shabbos dinner invitations, scrawling frantically outside the margins.

I scrubbed it clean today, and it did not come easy. The letters clung. The schedule refused to be erased, echoes of words like π‘€π‘œπ‘›π‘‘π‘Žπ‘¦, and other useless things shadowing the space. I chipped two nails doing it.

I chose a city I had never been to. I packed a bag and packed my car and I left one day. I could tell you stories about churches in the snow and meals by tiki torches, about cherry trees and bourbon breakfasts in my shul and watching the seasons change. About a man with a knife. A lease I signed on someone’s doorstep. About piecing this life together with each piece of furniture carried six blocks to my first apartment, because I did not know how to parallel well to drive them.

It was glorious. I spent so many nights watching the moon in pajamas from this side of the country. Playing in the snow in slippers. Marveling that such a place even existed.

I don’t want it back. I want to forge it once again. Not to just return; I want undiscovered streets and the glory of new beginnings and a clean, white slate.

I know it won’t be clean. I know the shadows of those letters can’t be totally erased, and they shouldn’t be. They are my building blocks, as much as anything. Beautiful, fierce fragments. How rare, to hold the wonder of a thousand new beginnings, in the same space as the moments I hold dearest. On the same cobbled streets.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breathing Fire

-
Breathing Fire Recently acquired skill sets:             Living from a suitcase. (Three suitcases.) Making myself quite at home in other people’s homes. Parallel parking. On the sidewalk. In the snow. I drank a shot of bourbon and heard that living feels like fire. I know what you mean about feeling fire. There is so much fire burning inside you that you don’t know how to channel. Like you’d breathe fire if you could. He had the knife to his wrist. To his throat. Look into my eyes. If you’re looking into my eyes, I want to believe you won’t do it. Why have you chosen this picturesque city, so different from the sprawling freedom of Texas? (The rest of you all have such logical reasons, I pinned a map to the dartboard and shot north of Houston.) Why? Is it enough to say that I chose something different? Rational friends beg practicalities. Was he dressed to go out? Did he have shoes on? You’re asking the wrong questions. I d...
Read more

Perhaps

-
I burnt my coffee this morning and it tastes like travel. Truly. This is the flavor of a flight made by 15 seconds. Of boutique cafΓ©s and getting lost at the train station. Of breakfast right out on the fire escape overlooking San Francisco. For the past three days, I have refused to write this. I refused to write about other burning things. What would I say. That I suddenly need herbs to help me sleep. That I let my mind sit in such a web of impatience that it burnt my skin. That I found myself scrubbing the floors clean at one in the morning, on my hands and knees, because there was absolutely no other reasonable thing to do at that hour. They smashed the windows on the avenue where we built a community. (I know home is the people, more than any place.) Dare I complain about the floors, when humans just around the corner are sweeping glass from shattered storefronts where we once shared ice creams, and gathering their livelihoods from the potholes in the streets? Dear Gd, but I see h...
Read more

But in My Heart I'm Jewish

-
I’ll tell you a story. It’s one of those deeper, family stories, but somehow I’ve always wanted to share it with you. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, because her face was bitten by a German Shepherd as a child. Because there was a nurse, Marie, who told her parents that they couldn’t hide harboring a little girl. My mother tells her story best. But I knew my grandma differently. I knew the woman who loved theatre and chocolates and beautiful dresses. I knew that when she passed away, and we drove to New York like we had throughout my childhood, her Manhattan apartment at the heart and height of everything suddenly felt too small to contain even the memories of us. I knew that when I let myself into her bathroom after the funeral to try on one of the abandoned garments, the dress was too small also and the laces snapped, and the hair tie I had braided so meticulously earlier that morning snapped in half a moment later, and I knew she watching. I knew the woman who sat on my bed...
Read more