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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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 luck with you. Ha, look at me. Seeking my fortune from a bird.

You know my schedule is mapped out by the minute but don’t know what month it is. I keep track by when the eggs or the yogurts in my fridge expire.

I am finding time in places I did not know time existed. Between bowls of cereal. Inside the birds’ songs first thing in the morning. I couldn’t find the pieces of the world I wanted most, and so I went out last night chasing fireflies. They are nostalgic for me, also.

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