we must return to where it was lost / if we want to find it again
Reese meets me in the hallway before school, ready for our twice-a-week individual work. I kneel and gently ask her to take off her backpack and coat. As I speak, she suddenly freezes, tears welling in her eyes.
“Your voice is wrong,” she says, tone rising with distress. Baffled, I keep myself calm and steady, which is our usual way unless we are playing.
“Your voice is telling me you are upset,” she cries, pushing her palms toward me. “Why are you sad?” she yells.
(more…)
My family has a Labor Day tradition – a trip to the shore without me, because to be blunt, while I love beaches, I am not a fan of sitting on them in the blaring sun. I am more of a rocky, cold, rough water, and sparsely populated beach person, which is the exact opposite of the Jersey Shore. Tradition dictates that I remain in our home with the dog, three cats, and a very antisocial and possibly blind lizard. I don cruddy clothing and pajamas and chip away at the layers of our house that come from living with three humans who cannot part with anything. In short, they leave, and I donate things and throw a lot away. It is my favorite weekend of the year.
This is why I am sitting in the dark at my kitchen table, the moon’s glow filtering through the skylight, apologizing to a parent whom I just spammed with things to think about for the school year, not realizing it is past midnight. I have five browser windows, three documents, and four email accounts open on my screen. I am bouncing between discussions with schools, lawyers, clinicians, my own teaching/caseload, a course presentation that is due soon, a creative writing piece that I can’t seem to push out words for, and a pleasure project that I am slowly hedging through that involves rewriting Sol LeWitt’s sentences on conceptual art for preschool (because OMG, it works. It. Works.). I’ve only been able to sit still to work on the above because of the satisfaction gained from organizing the garage and both kids’ rooms and 85% fixing the rusted ball joint on our basement bathroom sink stopper.
That was a very long way of explaining how one person in this giant world regulates herself during a period of deep sadness. I write this not because all is doom and gloom because it’s not, but because sometimes we need to acknowledge the strange mass of Vantablack in the room. In my case, that’s grief.
I tackled one of the messier spaces in our house a few hours ago – a small sunroom that holds an exercise bike, a few weights, and our PC and printer. It was filled with piles of crap – both kids’ unemptied backpacks from last year, random pieces of paper, baseball and Pokémon cards, Sid’s art supplies, and all of the phone chargers I have been looking for over the last twelve months. I emptied Emmett’s pack first, then scooped the playing cards into a box to be sorted. I pulled out unused supplies that could be used this year and paused for a second to sigh and lament that my baby is now in his last year of elementary school. Then, it was time to go through Sid’s things.
Sid has been away for seven weeks, and we are preparing for his next step, which likely will not be at home with us. I cannot express how difficult this has been for the entire family, and each time we get over one hump, another higher hill of emotion awaits. I am incredibly proud of my child and of all four of us. Healing – understanding and learning from how each of us communicates, tackling and sitting with excruciating feelings, navigating the should have / could have / wish we had threads of guilt – is really fucking hard work.
I had spent the morning on calls and email back and forths about my child’s future, and then took my seething anger at the American school and mental health systems and channeled it into cleaning out the refrigerator. When I finally went through Sid’s backpack, I was blasting music on the turntable because I needed to feel it reverberate through my everything. Plus, it can’t hurt to dance a little.
So, I was dancing on the gross carpet after chucking half-completed homework assignments and old candy wrappers into the garbage when I realized I was hugging Sid’s backpack. I had pulled the canvas close to my chest, my fingers rubbing the material, and the lyrics Home is where I want to be / Pick me up and turn me round /I feel numb, burn with a weak heart / I guess I must be having fun ran through my brain like razors of emotion. I curled around the backpack, kneeling on the half-cleaned floor, and sobbed. I cried hard and then hung his things in the hall closet and stood in the clean, empty living room and listened to the needle tracking on the record’s dead wax, the crackle of no sound, and thought to myself, did I just hurt so hard that I feel nothing, or did I open wide until the emotions completely filled me?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that irony of emptiness. A room can appear so full but actually be vacant; conversely, an empty space can be so full of memory. In these days of intensity, these moments that trigger the need to cleanse and organize and reorganize and seek sense and order, the fullness feels so empty, and the emptiness so full.
Things I have learned in the last two weeks in no particular order:
Years ago, I lived way way east on the Upper East Side, east enough that it was a hike from the last stop on the crosstown bus, literally past the last avenue. It was a tiny tiny apartment – a sixth-floor walkup – and the stairs were spiral and outside and made of stone. I loved that apartment more than almost any other place I’d live in, mainly because, despite its minuscule square footage – I think it was 250 or 300 sq ft – it had three triple-tiered windows that went from ceiling to floor, and a tiny but useable balcony, which had once been for tuberculosis patients to “take the cure” but served as an excellent spot for looking out across Manhattan and the East River. Said apartment also had a kick-ass kitchen, which is pretty entertaining given that I rarely ate or cooked in it, but having counter and cabinet space seemed like an absolute luxury when I was twenty-one years old.
Given its proximity to the river and the tall buildings that lined it, my street was often like a wind tunnel. I remember walking home from Lexington or the crosstown bus on frigid nights, the winter air cutting through my hat and scarf. When it snowed, which it often did in the years that I lived there, large drifts would pile up, and the swirls of white would consume the buildings like low clouds. I spent a lot of time watching the world through those giant windows.
I remember waking one morning to a strange dimness, as though someone was cupping their hands over the sun and realized that it was snowing hard – storming – and nearly a foot already lined the streets. I love snow. I love how it mutes the world. I love the silence. I love the sense of solitude it can bring. Standing at my window that morning, I could barely decipher east from west. The streets were empty. I pulled on my running clothes and laced my sneakers tightly, then skip-slid down my six flights of outdoor stairs covered by windblown snow, flung open the gate to the building, and began to make my way west toward Central Park.
Snow running is hard work, and by the time I reached the park, I was out of breath and sore, despite being a reasonably experienced runner, so I slowed to a trudge. I couldn’t see the roadway and paths, so I walked and listened to the sound of ice crystals falling thump thump into the pads of snow. The sun had emerged from the cloud layer, and its rays sifted through the tree branches, covered in white, like a winter understory, the snow standing in for the spring and summer leaves. I walked and wondered and listened to the sound of nothingness. There was no one else around and for a good hour, I felt like time had stopped.
Then I got cold. Very cold. I pivoted and looked back at my tracks, now covered with a new layer of snow. I looked around and realized I had no idea where I was. I struggled to find a landmark, something familiar to give me a sense of where in the park I’d wandered to, but all I could see were trees. I panicked for a moment – these were the days before cell phones and watches with fancy GPS – and then took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was in a park in the middle of an island, and no matter what direction I walked in, I would inevitably hit one piece of the perimeter. I had run almost every inch of Central Park in daylight and darkness. It wasn’t possible to get lost, just sidetracked.
Lifting my heavy, frozen feet, I began to run. The snow was well past 18”, so it was more like high-knee jogging, but as the blood started flowing back into my limbs, as I began to feel my fingertips and stopped obsessing over the fact that I’d had to pee for an hour and that I hadn’t brought money or subway fare, as I just fell into the ragged but still rhythmic breath that moved in and out of my lungs, as my arms pumped and heart pounded, and my eyes gained greater focus on the snowy landscape before me, I managed to find my exit. It was, of course, way north and on the other side of town, but I reached the semi-plowed street and visible sidewalks, and despite having to run an extra few miles back home, I got there eventually.
I’ve been thinking about that morning lately – how beauty shifted so quickly to panic, how a journey through a place I knew with my eyes closed suddenly felt ominous, how lost I felt, how solitude morphed into alone, how hopelessness avalanched. Sometimes feeling lost in the known is more disorienting than being thrust into the unknown. It’s hard to remind yourself that you are also a park in the middle of an island. There are perimeters to every experience, even if they appear nonlinear. Even when storms blur things into gradients of white, there is depth beneath, there is underbrush, and there are clues to paths and exits and streets and subways and far-off rivers. Somewhere in there, the high-knee running shifts back to even strides and plowed sidewalks.
object of memory 