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Showing posts from February, 2021

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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Some Kind of Human Kindness

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I stood for seven hours in the freezing rain. Perhaps it was dystopian. The clinic would exist for 24 hours, for a vaccine only just approved, because there was an apocalypse and the whole world shut down around us. Six thousand people huddled in the snow that day, with coffees and ponchos and rainboots. Perhaps in another life, we’d sit in some white plastic chair at our nearest pharmacy and be out in twenty minutes. Perhaps by now we’ve all done things we never thought we would. Perhaps even when the whole world ends, people still have coffees with them.   (We were discussing which celebrities we’d stand in that line for. A coffee date with Pink. Perhaps I’d stand in line to have brunch with Lady Gaga. I thought seven hours was more than enough time to make it back by shabbos. Ice water pooled up through our shoes; not even Gaga, at that point. I should have eaten breakfast. At 4pm they told us we’d be there long past nightfall.) I turned to the woman who gave the announcement. W...
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𝐎𝐧 𝐏𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐦

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The truth is, I feel like I can’t do Purim this year. I don’t want to. Because Purim, Yom Kippurim, a day like Yom Kippur, a day that is actually the most joyous and sacred and festive of all them, a time for accessing miracles, is for most of us the time when everything starts over. Round 2, a full year completed, but a little less naïve this time. We know what we’re staring through. Perhaps I haven’t lost all of the naivety. I’m still promising Pesach will be the yetzias, like I’ve always been. I’m still harboring some hope that, if it isn’t Simchat Torah, we’ll all dance through Chanukah the way that we once did. I have no patience for dressing up, I am quite content with the glitter I wore last year, thank you. I still find it everywhere – there was some on my pillowcase just last night, in fact, when I was thinking of a choice and wondering if I chose correctly. So perhaps there was something powerful to last year, if I’m still finding glitter because of it. If I found glitter for...
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