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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๐Ž๐ง ๐๐ฎ๐ซ๐ข๐ฆ

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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 naรฏve 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 a year already.

I also have no patience for making shaloch manot right now. It feels like we’ve been doing that for every holiday this year already. Here is a Pesach kit, to make seder by yourself. Here are Shavuot chocolates. (Not that I wasn’t grateful for it. We made lovely seders with those Pesach kits, and I ate the chocolates at work for 3 weeks easily.) I just don’t want to anymore. Maybe it’s just that Purim is the last thing I’m holding on to. It hasn’t been tainted yet. It hasn’t been wrapped up in ribbons and handed to me in a box.

I do understand that sometimes the thing you can’t bear the thought of if is actually what you need to do most. That you need something in such direct contrast to your feelings to break into a cleaner space. Or at least a more connected one.

Perhaps Purim can reset it, even? I mean, Purim feels more or less when it all broke in the first place. Perhaps Purim can put it back?

Perhaps we’re always just on the outskirts of everything. On the outside looking in, through every storefront window and wedding venue and dearest friend’s apartment. Looking on at what we once were, at what we so dearly want. It’s so damn close too, just on the other side of that pane of glass. It’s always been so close.
 
Perhaps the holidays that we can’t handle, the ones we hold because the calendar was the first thing we were commanded, perhaps they are the gateway. The things that connect us back to that time. Hell, they are the things that connect us to past generations, to lost moments in time as far back as the bible. To communities in other countries half a world away, lighting Shabbos candles just like we are. Who says it can’t work for this? That something strong enough to endure persecution and generations of transitions isn’t also strong enough to just open a window? I think it can be. Perhaps that is Purim this year.

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