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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Needles

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I pulled boxes of hamantaschen from my car last night, and stacked them on the kitchen floor. Laughed, because dozens of needles whispered across the tiles. Firs and juniper leaves. 

I stepped into my students’ house the other day. Their father was in the room; instinctively he brought his hands to cover his face.

I literally don’t care, I told him.

He smiled. I’ve known you two years, he said. And I don’t think, in all that time, I’ve ever seen your face. I could pass you at the grocery store and not recognize you.

You’ve never seen my face. But you lent me your ladder last year, and access to the evergreens when my shuls needed schach for sukkos. You let my take the hedgers, climb twenty feet high and trim them between classes. Apparently my car is still filled with pine needles. I hope it always will be.

I stepped into my student’s house the other day. His mother was in the room, preparing for a yoga lesson. A black cat I didn’t know she had perched on the windowsill, beside the rosemary.

I’ve known you two years, I said. And I never once set foot inside your house. This is the first time we’re all inside together.

Two years, and yet we trained through snowstorms in your driveway. Just beyond where the cat is sitting.

I don’t know how to feel this time, or hold space for the transitions. I don’t know how to smell the incense in your living room, because for all this time your house just smelled like snow to me.
Perhaps I’m going through the motions. Letting it happen naturally. Smiling back as though nothing was ever different, crying because our eyes have changed so completely.

There are ways in which we couldn’t feel. Connections that were severed, stunted, never had the chance to build back-and-forth correctly. Words missing the power of a smile that should follow them. Gestures that mean the world but lack the warmth of an embrace.
 
I wonder if the healing will happen the same way as the falling apart. If it will be as instantaneous as the first time I saw you smile, or filled with subtle hesitancies to be assuaged with time. Probably both at once.
 
That’s how it usually is. 





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