conversation at work

I'm reaching into the milk refrigerator, probably in order to refill a pitcher.

Cody: Be careful. The skim milk is topless.
Me: Umm... I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that. But, I guess as long as she is.
Cody: Oh, who would notice anyway? She's skim.

timestamps

So, I work at a cafe now. Today was the first full day of school at MATCH High School, and I wasn't there.

7: 15 - Around this time, I realize, Kirsten would be waiting for me by the elevator, our high heels echoing in the dark, empty "big hall," unmuffled by the college pennants. We were rarely fully verbal until one or the other of us slunk across Comm Ave. to pick up coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. Instead, I'm scraping out the unused raspberry muffin batter the bakers left, then washing the bowl in cloudy water, letting warm sanitizer drip down my face and shirt as I hoist the clean dishes onto the drying racks above my head. I'm deep in thought, prayer even, as the water wrinkles the tips of my fingers.

9:00 - Last year, I would be in the middle of period one -- probably a brain frame or two on the whiteboard, probably at least one whiteboard marker dried out, probably trying to wake up a few sleepy sixteen-year olds leaning against the wall. Today, I'm wrapping lemon ginger scones in eco-friendly paper, and handing them over to salivating customers.

10:30 - Last year, period three begins. I'm standing at the doorway to room 203, shaking each kid's hand as she walks into the room. With some, elaborate routines have evolved. Salutes. Primitive daps. Mostly smiles. I remind one student about staying super-focused today, ask another about his weekend. Around this time a few days ago, a woman I recognized entered the store with her girlfriend. We used to be in a book club together. She asks if this is what I do now, if I'm not teaching. I confirm this. She says, "Oh. I'm sorry."

12:30 - I would be sitting at my desk right now. Or rather, at a table facing away from my official workspace (as I cannot work with my back to the open space). There would be a small pile of assignments haphazardly stacked on my desk, a scraped-together lunch (probably takeout from across the street) half eaten in front of me. There would be at least one other lion-hearted teacher within earshot, planning, processing, laughing. There would probably be swearing at the photocopier. Now I am standing in a narrow space before a long cutting board, frenetically assembling sweet potato sandwiches and turkey wraps for faces that are becoming familiar. I don't have to call John's name. I remember him. I know that this time of day, this ham sandwich will leave off the cream cheese. Got it. I'm in a zone, moving around my coworker like a dancer, grasping at tomato wedges and cucumbers without thought. If I make a mistake, there will be half a sandwich to throw away (or, more likely, foist upon a roommate); it will not translate into a frustrated child calling my cell at 10pm with questions.

5pm - I would still be at work... making photocopies, ravenous. Kirsten and I would be rushing each other out the door, trying to scheme up a justification for a beer or pizza run. We would rehash our frustrations, triumphs. The whole ride home would feel like a swift decompression or a slow high-five. Tonight, I am sitting on the green couch when she comes home. Though I showered after work, my wet hair is already completely dry. I'm wearing a tank top. No makeup. I'm laughing with another roommate, telling silly anecdotes from earlier years.

It's not better, exactly. Nor is it worse. It is change, though... needed change.

And we're ordering thai tonight. High five to that.

natural history

I envy the gryptodont, ancient car-sized armadillo,

his thousand-bone-coat

But you can’t buy one of those in the museum store

So I tug on the stretchy gray cotton and absently trace

my own collarbone

Such a frail little skeleton is mine, still scented of fig from the shower.

I stare into the eyes of the white-furred Asian tiger,

count how many times I would fit into the ribcage of the fin whale suspended from the ceiling

Standing straight?

Curled into a ball?

Somewhere between the vibrantly feathered tatingers

and the porous kickball sized egg of the extinct elephant bird,

the chill creeps past the pink polish on my bare toes, sinks deep into my calves, knees, up into my arms, shoulders

And I am shivering there, uninterested in reading about the evolution of the mammal jawbone or the helmet of the beetle

But bracing against the terrible cold

Trying to hide the evidence screaming from my own ribcage and its small pink thermometers

As the whirling of my own centrifuge begins,

Leeching all the strength out of the iron pinions on which my skin hangs

Melting down the muscles and bones and spinning them inward toward the center

Every fiber silent and serving

The one that waits

Weeping blood

For the child that I was

And the ones who won’t meet my eyes on the subway platform

And for the ones I will not bear

Even now in August, the misting raindrops by the train station greet like icicles

But I crane my neck toward the sky and close my eyes

As if I deserve the cold stinging

For being such a small thing in the wide world

Just another homo sapien in the great hall, yellowed bones like the others

Like the skull of the triceratops or the giant sloth

While in my abdomen,

Small worlds make and break themselves.

I am bodily.

Terrestrial.

Of the earth like a geode.

summer music shouldn't brood

Hey folks. I made you a summer mix. And it's of the giddy, irresistible movement-inducing sort. Just right for this weather.

Also, today is my last day teaching. Ever. Tomorrow I go home. Home! And then, on Saturday, I start my new job at a cafe three blocks from my house. Life is unspeakably good.

sometimes, when i walk...

Sometimes, when I walk, my heart whispers prayers for which my mind cannot find words. Today, most of them sought response to bitingly familiar words… “Fool, fool. You’re not enough.”

For an hour or so, I sit still on a bench beside the pond. I want to write, to use my pen to throw up my hands, shake my fist at the universe and its maddening predictability. Then I still and notice perhaps a hundred ducks swimming, one tiny body far behind the others, moving not with the placid floating wings and elegant face of the adults, but with the halting, imprecise movements of a toddler. It strains, each stroke of its new legs perceptible by the straining bob of its fuzzy head. It falls further behind, then skitters out of the water, flapping and running across its surface to join the older tribe.

I laugh.

Still quieter I become, drawing up my leg, listening to my breath. The tiny duck wobbles in the water, like a fat-legged child in a diaper, scooting too far to the left, then the right, then correcting its course. Stopping. Starting again. Irregular, urgent movements in a body that doesn’t yet know its own flow.

Dogs run past me, one that has the equivalent of a spiky crew cut holds its eyes wide open, tongue lolling with its head to the left, and smiles… really smiles at me.

A woman tosses bread to the ducks. Pigeons, sparrows take notice. I watch the purple glint off the necks of the pigeons, their territorial walk as they muscle the sparrows away. One bobs closer to me, so close that I can see the feathers on its feet. It takes no notice of me.

The sparrows bide their time, craning fragile necks, now inching closer, now backing away from the blustering larger birds. One sparrow is rather dopey, its beak hanging open during every hop, scratching its head against branches.

A chipmunk rustles among the sparrows behind my bench. I want to touch the sheen that glows along its hind legs. I imagine the softness, much like the downy lines of fur along ears and neck of the cat that curls in my lap when I sit down long enough.

I move a bit to see better. The chipmunk starts, runs away.

So much to see! So many languages being spoken here, almost silent but not quite, to me indecipherable. One sparrow shakes her wings, hops, directs her neighbors. I watch one reach into another’s beak to share a bite and wonder, as a pre-teen trying to understand the mechanics of French kissing, how do they know which way to turn so they don’t knock heads?

Each bird so singular! But awkward grace of the new ones, the bullying of the large, all this is so universal!

On my walk back from the pond, I reach out to touch the objects I pass – closing my eyes as the low stone wall transfers its sun-bathed warmth into my fingertips and palms; I close my eyes and try to isolate the smell of car exhaust and new tar from subtle green; I close my eyes and listened to the men chuckling deep and barrel-throated from the T station, the children giggling and then whining as the sprinkler drops dry cold across their bare chests.

I reach the end of the wall, look down at the pink of my fingers, then press their rough heat against my face. I study and caress the irregular bark of the birches I pass, smiling wide and yes, foolish, unconcerned that all the cars can see.

So many senses. The hair on my shins stands up as I catalogue them back to myself; I shiver and thrill. Like the sparrows, the ducks, like the birch bark and the squealing children, I too have a place here. I need never fear being insufficient, being a fool. To focus there is to miss a much more eloquent story.

I feel fairly certain that all manner of thing shall be well.

Sometimes, when I walk, my heart whispers prayers for which my mind cannot find words. And sometimes these prayers are answered.

lest you judge me for my caffeine intake

Today, you wake up with your head cemented to the pillow. You look down at your arms, without moving the anvil that is attached to your neck. Not gonna happen. And early morning yoga is out of the question. Your thighs and back laugh back at you when you silently pose the question. Ha! Woman! (Because sometimes, those things are irritable and downright rude. You might issue them demerits if you could.) What’s wrong with you? they ask. Bed. Bed is good.

There is a drip of dried beige paint on the cinderblock wall next to your right arm. You dimly acknowledge that taking notice of paint irregularities means you’re sufficiently awake to brush your teeth. Lump of weighty potatoes that you are, you flop gracelessly out of your bunk. Ergh. You stare down at your toes, blurry pink blobs, half-surprised to note that they are holding you up. It turns out you still have bones. And muscles. Somewhere in there, you have muscles.

You stumble down the hallway, tugging absently at your blue camisole. The door to the bathroom weighs more than you do, surely. You look down at your face wash and then up at the mirror.

Good. Lord.

The hair.

The entire left side of your head has dried in spiky straight porcupine lines, each wild tuft perpendicular to the skull from which it springs. The right side is such a poofy mass of curly reddish weeds that it might just be hiding a small animal. You grimace.

Then you grunt (womanishly, but with no sensible word-like sounds) at the perfectly well-coifed seventh grader who is staring at you incredulously with a toothbrush in her mouth.

Happy Monday. Let's celebrate with enormous quantities of coffee. Deal?

"she puts her hands against / the life she had"

It is late. Newly showered, with my short-shorn curls drying erratically around my ears, I keep the watch as eight thirteen-year old girls squirm about on their beds, allegedly trying to sleep.

I am living, for the moment, in an enclave of brick and marble and lawn, with maybe fifty middle school students in the middle of northern nowhere, Massachusetts. I am alternately their reading/writing instructor, their bananagrams adversary, and the one who forces it by ensuring solitary shower time and prompt compliance with rules. Each night, I collapse on my springy mattress utterly spent.

And as I so often do, I turn my gaze inward to make an inquiring sweep of my landscape, finding myself again amused and surprised by where I exist. I’ve just set aside a novel about piracy and time travel and romance, and find that the waves that crash and swell inside my own life, though perhaps of smaller amplitude than those in my book, rock me about as concretely as if I were one of its colorful characters. My own story continues to shock and thrill me, proving itself of greater adventure than if I had crafted it myself. I am, however, pleased to report significantly less mortal peril than that faced in the novel. Possibly also less sex. It's a pretty great book.

I have not written here – really written -- for some time. I am hard-pressed to explain this, other than to say that sometimes it is possible to live outside of yourself long enough that you forget your voice. I am coming back to mine, inviting it to hold my hand and walk forward with me in the open (not just releasing it from its basket under the stairs every few months for a frolic and then prompt re-containment).

For the last few years, I have been seduced by the specter of a Noble Life, and have silenced the Life that wishes to live in me. No matter how I try to corral my own story, submerge it in water like so much bamboo and train it into a shape that looks like those of people I so admire, the life that wants to live in me is unwilling to bend thus. It may be noble, in the end. Or not. But whatever it is, I am trying to unclench my fists and jaws… stop fighting, stop silencing. Whatever life I’m left with, post-MATCH, it will be my own.

To speak plain, I have finished my job. I am working in a one-month summer intensive program. And after that, I have no idea. No job. But my heart is open and clear, and I know who I am. Perhaps I will write more here, because I am no longer afraid of writing my way into truths I cannot face.

Goodnight, friends. I have missed you. And I have missed myself. But I am back.