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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Lanterns

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I get lost in the rain. I let you tell me I have beautiful eyes.

I don’t know why I walked into this store. I think the things I’m looking for aren’t in isle 7 beside the toilet paper and cheap tupperwear. I think the empty isles come closest. I think summer was a dream, I think I’d tucked away the feeling of learning which stores were boarded up and which ones still sold peanut butter. Of escorting strangers to buy necessities.

Today I saw a stranger who looked like an old friend.

I speak to my mom and tell myself it’s been 8 months since I’ve seen her. I wonder what would happen if I touched you by mistake. And so I’m standing in a world where the world avoids me, where everyone is masked and the masks are second nature, and wondering what I’m doing here.

No. I know what I’m doing.

I’m swimming in defiance. I’m stealing back the stolen moments, making promises I shouldn’t. I’m dancing on the fucking rooftops.

The beauty of the sukkah is not the twinkling lights and pretty decorations. It is the lack of permanence. It is our ability to build a refuge through anything, exactly as we need it now because it was never meant to outlast this moment. To string lanterns and make it lovely.

And come winter?

I’ll wander like I used to. I’ll stand outside windows like I stood at the start of it. I taught children to fight in the snow in Chicago. I’ll do it again.

Holding the heart of these moments. Champaign for the holidays. Grass stains in a white sweater. Caught between “I can do more,” and “I’m doing too much.”

I will always be the girl walking beside the road with a backpack and red cowboy boots. At a crossroads. Even still.

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