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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On Yom Kippur

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I climbed down to the river and said tashlich in the creek. Tangled in the weeds and wondering if I could beg forgiveness of myself this year, or if that defeats the purpose.

For all the moments I misjudged, and the weight I placed upon them.

The chances that I took for given.

For that day - was it last year, truly? - when I looked into the river but saw your eyes instead, and saw the things I should have said but wasn’t brave enough to say them.

They taste like earth, and smell like rain, and they will always, always carry connotations.

I know I made you cry that day.

Forgive me.

*

Perhaps Yom Kippur holds the answers I’ve been looking for. Perhaps they’ve been here all this time.

A legal prayer set to annul our vows. So, our words hold enough power to require a special prayer just to nullify them. Enough power for the things we miss to require nullification. It makes sense, after all. G-d created with words, also.

And yet. There is space to recognize that even granted use of something powerful as words, even granted partnership in building what G-d built with…we are still human with them.

Even on a day when we are likened to the angels.

Forgive me.

*

It’s really a way back, you know. Kol Nidrei was created to absolve forced converts. Teshuva never meant repentance, it means to return. And so every year we walk in the words they wrote to find their own way back to their communities and homes – but what are we returning to?

To the intentions that we meant when we gave those oaths?

To the people that we gave them to?

To that pure and unadulterated version of ourselves, the one that knew without a doubt we could change worlds with a promise?

*

Perhaps all the dirt and doubt are scrubbed clean when our sins are.

And so we are returned, in the sacredness of those moments, to the people we are meant to be. The ones waiting beneath the wounds and the weight of our confessions.

Perhaps that is permission.

We held hands and danced last year, at the end of it. At the promise of the clean slate we’d been given.

We held hands, and danced like children.

Perhaps that is who we truly are, then.


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