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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My Mother's Eyes

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I’m sitting in the windowsill because this tastes like travel coffee, like the kind I used to drink right out on the fire escape of those Chinatown hotels, and I don’t know where I’m going.

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She teaches self-defense? A client, perusing my website. I remember when I took the photo she is looking at; I was teaching in a park and I’d smeared mud across my face on purpose, two bold lines in defiance of all that the pandemic was. But she’s so small.

In response, my friend smiles. Look at her eyes.

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I am back in New York. A letter to a rabbi I did not intend to write. Pages upon pages, scrawled in the back corner of his cemetery. They must be quite familiar with the things that people ask for here, sitting in this room. A box of tissues placed right beside the pens. Pots of coffee down the hall. Someone must have known.

My mother wrote a letter once, for her mother who is buried in this cemetery also. It explained the diagnosis. What would she say to us?

I read her letter at my grandma’s grave.

Someone must have known.

--

A man flags me down outside of Target. Hey, girlfriend! Wait up.

I never wait up. But this time I stopped. He is friendly, charismatic, and collecting donations for the United Breast Cancer Foundation. He says his name is Douglas and asks me if I’d like to donate.

My mother was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer about four weeks ago, I find myself telling this stranger, right there on that intersection near the coffee shop. Lately I’ve been telling this to a lot of strangers, but at least today it’s relevant. I got back from Texas at 1 a.m. this morning. Sure, what the hell.

Take a wild guess, he tells me. How much do you think one round of chemo costs?

I look him in the eyes. I know how much chemo costs. I had this same conversation two damn days ago.

--

The nurse carefully attaches the chemo drip to the port in my mother’s chest. I still don’t understand why I am in the hospital or how there is this nurse giving chemo to my mom. I still don’t understand how my mom has cancer; she spent her whole life proving all the doctors wrong.

The chemo runs slowly. I’m watching the line but the nurse is watching me.

Has anyone told you? You have your mother’s eyes.

--

I am back in my apartment. Wondering when sad became synonymous with soft-spoken, or when I’ll unpack my suitcase. Wondering how long I’ll sit curled up in the windowsill.

Has anyone told you. Look at her eyes.

 

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