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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Fire Through the Wreckage

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They cancelled the conference. The first time I went was my first weekend in the city, when I knew that I would live here someday. The next was the first time I gave a presentation from the pulpit. The day I redefined that dress. The day I really learned what love means.

What does it mean that it’s all put on hold, when I finally found it? What is left in place of the year that was stolen from me? I find I’m working twice as hard to make the same ends meet. Where does the motivation comes from, when I can’t see the people who used to motivate me? It is there intrinsically, the desire to build something useful through the hell and the chaotic. This is my defiance, this is how I fight when I don’t have a solid target.

Is it strange that I am teaching kids to fight on screen? It says something about their resilience – they have learned to adjust the camera and type questions and say hi to classmates from 1500 miles away. They have learned to spar with people they never met face to face. I am not sure what this means.

I know that when I talk to people I say more than I intended. Perhaps I see more than they meant to show me. Perhaps the world had started breaking long before we saw those cracks, perhaps we can reach out from some deeper place this time and start to heal collectively.

Build with me? That is my request. However it looks for you, build connections to each other and to the things we hold the closest. Hold my hand in your own way. You and I can touch this time, and make it mean something.

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