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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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 cafés 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 humanity.
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I will always remember that I fell in love wearing a white dress. (I was also betrayed in white and had, for a time, sworn off the color completely, along with denim skirts and green things.) Now I wear it as a point of pride; I got dressed that day intending to redefine it, and I had.

Perhaps this is our redefining. Somehow the vows were nullified, the commitments cancelled, the things we thought impossible to live a day without swept from beneath our fingertips. What is left? Empty calendars. White pages.

I was wearing white 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 day, when the downpours started. (Perhaps downpour is the wrong word; too mild a term for dodging shooting trashcans in the street and watching trees fall around us.) White as I clung to the side of a house that wasn’t mine, just as I’d clung in my dream, for fear the wind would ruin me. White when a person I had known for barely 3 weeks ushered me inside, with gifts of dry clothes and music.

Perhaps I do remember how to let people protect me.
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The flavor of my dreams have shifted; I can chronicle them all. The one apocalyptic dream. There was only ever one. The month of dances and reunions. A week of travelling. And then finally the dream about the windstorm, the one I should not have shared but did. I don’t dream these anymore.

The trail was littered with dead birds this week, tiny ruffled feathers pressed against the pavement. I have seen what happens to the fallen birds. Nobody touches them, except by accident. Utter disregard for their broken bodies. They litter the cobbles and disintegrate beneath the feet of frantic humans or their careless pets, until only the wings remain. Tiny little wings.

Perhaps one day I’ll learn to sit in the silence and quiet my mind.
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I have forgotten the codes to the synagogues. I remember the seating arrangements for our Shabbos dinners. I remember who I danced with the first night we danced together. And I cannot get into the place I helped build.

The songs no longer make me cry. (They are also my defiance. Borrowed fire, in a way, as flame is sometimes meant to be.) This bit took a while, and at times I know I don’t remember the songs properly either. When I do remember them, I sing them in my head in a voice that isn’t mine.

Perhaps this is why it had to break.
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Perhaps there is greater strength in what we put back together.
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And so. We will build it with our hands, and forge it with our souls.
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If I take your hand, will you build it with me?

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