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Showing posts from June, 2020

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 World Fell on it’s Collective Ass

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I used to have expressive eyes. Perhaps masks are the world’s unifying feature. Perhaps they make pretty little mannequins of most of us. I am on Zillow looking at houses. What the heck am I doing at one in the morning, with a sink full of dishes dating through Tuesday, looking at houses? A sky-blue door, I think. I wandered everywhere yesterday. Drexel and Penn and South Philadelphia, talking to myself like a well-dressed lunatic, trying to discern the direction of my life. Don’t you also, at some point? Don’t you think aloud because words feel slightly more substantial than unspoken thought? Don’t you also speak to just defy the silence? (To justify the silence?) Perhaps I am the only one to wander past three shuls at once and watch the ones who used to stand there. Has everything changed, or has nothing? I sleep too much and rest too little. People are desperate. Mannequins are liars. * π·π‘’π‘Žπ‘Ÿ 𝐺-𝑑, π‘Œπ‘œπ‘’ π‘˜π‘›π‘œπ‘€ 𝐼 𝑠𝑑𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑔𝑒𝑑 π‘šπ‘¦π‘ π‘’π‘™π‘“ π‘–π‘›π‘‘π‘œ π‘‘π‘Ÿπ‘œπ‘’π‘π‘™...
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Nitrous

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This is harder, in a way. Seeing you through a mask is better than a screen. It breaks my heart a little bit each time. Here is what I think might happen. I think the person that I was, the one I worked so hard to find the day I left Texas with a vintage suitcase and a one-way ticket, she wouldn’t have survived this. I think the person I’ve become won’t fit into her old life. I’m not yet sure what this means going forward. I need to ask a favor. Will you forgive my broken heart? They pulled my tooth the other day. I kept making them laugh, so they wouldn’t do it. I don’t remember the song I was humming; it was half the visit before I realized I was doing it. Laughter is the purest wisdom. That’s what I decided. I haven’t quite figure out how to describe it. Music instead of nitrous oxide; I didn’t choose the song but by Gd it was fitting. π‘†π‘œπ‘šπ‘’π‘‘π‘–π‘šπ‘’π‘  π‘šπ‘¦ π‘ π‘π‘–π‘Ÿπ‘–π‘‘’𝑠 𝑠𝑑𝑖𝑙𝑙 π‘ π‘œ π‘ π‘π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘’π‘‘. Lying in that chair, staring at masked faces, watching them work on me. I felt ...
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Nostalgia

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Today the city smells like Austin. I wore my heart on my sleeve and my neighbor’s sock to work. Walked home in the silence and watched a tree fall, equal parts mesmerized and numbed to the shock of it. (Somebody else had to call the police. I have acquired 13 calls in less than two years already, and I’m not quite certain they don’t cut you off at 14.) Perhaps it is nostalgia that makes the city smell like Texas to me. Like waking up in a stranger’s house in that Airbnb, where I’d let myself in like I usually do and shared a blue tiled bathroom with an elderly Korean couple, before making my way down to the office with a suitcase. I am so tired of the masks. The physical and the metaphorical both. I thought one would destroy the other, and maybe for a time it had. (Perhaps I’ll run away and shed them both for a little while.) The largest crow I’d ever seen landed near my stoop this morning. And as it took flight with it’s massive, inky wings I remember thinking: please take the bad luc...
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Perhaps

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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...
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