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.”

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“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.

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“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 same title, that we posted on the same day without knowing that the other wrote it, and I know she is also crying. “You’ll be home in a few weeks.”

I’m home now. I’m telling her she’ll be okay, the way she told me all my life, every sore throat and long day and bad dream, that I’d be okay. I’m just as confident as she was. In fact I’m quite convinced the reasons for all those sick days in first grade were so I could remind her one day.

I’m crying because it will work.

Because I want to say to her, “You taught me how to be okay all those other times. See, it’s like this.”

Because I only know how to pray when things are hard, and I wish my sister had stayed the night, and what I took for the skyline through that airport window was nothing more than strangers’ reflections in the glass, and my G-d it’s complicated.

It’s gonna be one hell of a survival story.

We both wrote a piece with the exact same name.

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