When you are sad

Put on makeup –
more than you normally would.
Eyeshadow, especially, will make you feel special
and pretty. So that you can look at yourself
and say:
I’m more than okay.
I can look good
even if my insides are collapsing.

Clean your house.
Your life may be a mess
and things may not be
as you wish –
but your house is neat and tidy.
The way you thought it always would be
when you were a child.

Be nice to other people.
It’s not their fault you are sad –
or, if it is
feel better in the fact
that you are the bigger person.

Don’t:
imagine what life could be like
picture yourself running away
dream of a different version of you.

There is only you
There is only this
This is only now

Make what you can of it.

“So far you have survived 100% of your toughest days.”

“You’re doing great.”

Instead.

I hope that someday, somebody wants to hold you for twenty minutes straight, and that’s all they do. They don’t pull away. They don’t look at your face. They don’t try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms, without an ounce of selfishness in it.
Jenna, Waitress

---

 

She spends her morning cataloging all the types of kisses she’s known.

There are kisses that leave you breathless.
They are: the end of the movie type kisses; the finally, finally, I’ve waited so long for this kisses; the blood pounding in your ears and stars in your eyes type kisses; the type of kisses that wrap you up and make the world disappear and make you think oh, i hope we kiss this way forever. 

There are kisses that are a promise of something more.
They are: often chaste, but followed up by lustful eyes and wet lips; quick, insistent, delivered through hooded eyes; or else, long and languid, trailing off slowly, confidently.

There are kisses for goodbye we’ll see each other soon, kisses for hello i’ve missed you, kisses when your body and mind are spent, content, flushed.

But what she really wants is not a kiss, wet and wanting, but a sign of love that’s not asking for anything.
She wants an assurance that the kiss is not the thing they’re after, after all, nor the things that come after kisses.
She wants the love that loves without expectation, love that stands still for its own sake. A love that sees her, and not the things she can offer in its stead.

 

All the same.

I feel small; but so are stars from a distance.
//somniloquencee, “ten word poem”

---

She looks around her classroom and lets out a small laugh. Laughing abruptly and unexpectedly has always been her way of dealing with feelings she hasn’t quite processed yet, and as she looks around at her now barren walls and empty desks she finds herself at quite a loss to describe exactly how she’s feeling at the moment. A coworker had asked her earlier – So was your first year what you expected? And she had answered after a long moment – Yes…and no. I guess? He had laughed and nodded his head in understanding, which was a bit confusing to her since she wasn’t even quite sure what she meant by such a response. Perhaps that had been his response, too, when someone asked him how he felt at the end of his first year of teaching. Perhaps no one really knew how to respond. That’s what she hopes, at least.

She shakes her head at the recollection and turns her attention back to her workspace – the disaster zone that is her desk area and filing cabinet – which is the last thing that needs to be cleared out before she steps out into her first summer vacation as a teacher. She sets an hour-long goal for herself so that this simple task doesn’t turn into the long, drawn out affair that cleaning out her closet or room at home always seems to become – a job that invariably becomes five times longer than it needs to be because she’s overly sentimental and ends up spending more time reminiscing on random objects she comes across than actually throwing things away.

She makes good headway for about thirty minutes, throwing away old snacks, hurriedly scrawled on post-its and broken pencils (seriously, she thinks, why did she keep so many broken pencils?). She finds a stack of documents she had printed off from some website or another, secondary texts and worksheets she’d planned on using for her persuasive unit but had shoved into a drawer and promptly forgotten about instead. She frowns at them, thinks about what a shame it was that she never used them, resolves to definitely use them next year before she files them away into the appropriate file folder. She finds a few referrals that she had kept meaning to send up to the office for filing but, whoops, never managed to make their way up there, a few phone numbers of parents she kept meaning to call but then accidentally forgot to do so (sometimes accidentally-on-purpose). Her desk is actually somewhat filled with things that she meant to do or wanted to get around to but never did. A graveyard of good (and, at the very least, more organized) intentions. A catalog of the teacher she’d wanted to be. She leans back in her chair, feeling melancholy. Yes, many of her students had come up to her, one after another, saying how much they had enjoyed having her as a teacher, made promises to visit next year, but now she thinks they’re the type of words said during high moments of emotion – empty, platitudes stated on the high rush of endings.

Then she finds a stack of student notebooks that hadn’t been taken home (or, more likely, found their way into the school’s recycling bin) and begins to idly leaf through them. She shakes her head at the messiness of most of her student’s notes but manages to rip out a few pages to use as exemplars for next year. Then she begins reading a few students’ journal entries from the beginning of the year, rereading the notes she wrote back to all 100 of them during that first semester. At the time, as she watched the hours tick by during her coveted weekend and her hand began to cramp, she had cursed herself for making such a lofty goal. Now, though, she’s glad she did it. Her students had read her notes voraciously, more than one commenting how they’d never expected her to really read the journal entries, how awesome it was to know that she actually cared about what they had written. Underneath one of them, she finds a page long note written to her from a student after she’d been sent to the office, a heartfelt apology for her behavior in class. The last thing she packs up is her personal copy of the school yearbook. She spends time looking over her students’ end of the year notes to her, numerous and running over pictures when empty space ran out, heart warmed at the kind messages (though she’ll have to remember to do a better job of teaching the difference between your and you’re next year).

She closes the door behind her and walks out into desk filled hallway, wheeling her rolling cart filled to the brim with books and office supplies behind her. She thinks back to the past year – her dreaded 8th hour, her successful 3rd hour intervention class, the slapdash end of the year yearbook club, the euphoria of her 3rd benchmark tests scores, the disappointing scores on her final benchmark test. She thinks about the hugs and handshakes from her students and their parents, a few tears shed, lots of thanks all around. She thinks – perhaps they won’t visit next year, but the things said in the heat of noonday sun were sincere at the time they were said. She realizes – perhaps her failures were numerous, but so were her victories. There will probably never be movies made about her first year, songs commemorating it, or speeches dedicated to it. She is no great general having just come through a great battle, or an intrepid explorer who has discovered new and exotic lands; nor is she some sort of brilliant scientist who has uncovered a miracle cure or a writer who has penned the next great American novel. But she is here, still standing, proud, exhausted, euphoric and a little wistful, on her last day of her first year, and it feels monumental all the same.

Only human.

You are a woman. Skin and bones. Veins and nerves. Hair and sweat.
You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies. Not excuses.
//Sarah Kay, The Type

---

When she thinks back on it, she believes that the turning point in her career had to be the day she had to contend with a bout of crying in the middle of a silent class.

Of course, any one who has been a teacher long enough – especially in the 8th grade – has undoubtedly seen quite a few children burst into tears. It’s understandable of course – all those surging emotions and broken hearts. The difference here being that the sobbing had been her own, and while she had been in an eighth grade classroom, she was not 13 years old and dressed in the red polo shirt and khaki pants of the prescribed school uniform – rather she was 26, dressed in a pencil skirt and a floral blouse, and sitting at the teacher’s desk.

And the crying wasn’t the kind that you do in the movie theater, when the lead has just sacrificed his or her life, or the lovers are never reunited after all. It wasn’t a stray tear out of the corner of your eye that you could hastily wipe up. It wasn’t even the light sobbing you do as someone’s breaking up with you, the kind where your eyes fill up and tears begin to leak down your face but you still gainfully manage to keep your face from crumbling.

No, this would probably be more appropriately called weeping. This was the kind of crying you only ever hear about in old Victorian novels, where the heroine throws herself across the floor keening in despair and beating at her chest; this was old testament bawling, loud cries bordering on hysterics, so complete that she had to keep gasping for air to fully fuel the sobs being ripped from her chest.

Even in the midst of her sobs, she felt ridiculous. Which really only contributed to the prolonging of the said sobbing. She had imagined herself a superhero, but had been brought down by one too many bad classes. She had thought of herself as a wall – high and impenetrable – but she had crumbled after a single, ill-timed snarky retort at the end of a long day. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, she kept thinking to herself, as she sat, head in hands, gasping through her fingers. She was a superhero and insults bounced off of her; her students were glass and she could see right through them; she was a statue and nothing could touch her.

She was none of those things. Suddenly, her despair deepened and the sobs that had finally, finally begun to abate started afresh once more. She was bombarded with thoughts that she was too soft, she was too young, she was to0 wide-eyed and pliable; that there would be no coming back from this, now; that now all the other teachers, all the others students, her entire world would come to learn what she had feared the most – that she was an impostor, a fraud, a useless adult masquerading as a capable teacher.

What can I do? She thought miserably.

“What did you say?” One brave student said in front of her, tentatively looking up from his lap and towards her.

She realized she must have spoken her thought out loud.

“I said, what can I do? What can I do to make this class better?” Of course she was still half crying and too short of breath, so the question came out more like, “Wh-wh-what ca-an I dooo? Wh-at can I do – hiccup- to maaaaake -deep breath- th-this class be-tt-tter?” She took a deep breath, forcing her sore throat to swallow back her tears. Softly, as though the volume of her voice would keep away any more tears, she continued. “I want you all to get out a piece of paper and tell me what I can do to make this class better. I like you guys but…but we can’t do this any more. Something has to give.”

She lightly sobbed at the end of the last sentence. Something had given, of course, and they all knew it. She was weak, pitiful, a wounded sorry sight.

One by one her students crept up to her, laid their papers on her desk and quietly returned to their seats. She could hear low whispers and hushed tones, but they were too low to clearly heard. She was too low to fully hear them. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on her clasped hands in her lap, twisting like as though they had the knobs to her tear ducts beneath them. She could only guess at their content – the murmured gloating of seeing a fallen, shattered enemy combatant; or giddy, secondhand embarrassment that comes with a loss of respect.

Once her students had quietly left the room to join the cacophony of their classmates in the whole, she slunk down in her chair once more, head in her hands. She might have begun sobbing once more, if a student hadn’t slowly come back in and shuffled up to her desk. She looked up at him – the loudest, the ringleader, the hardest to wrangle. She could only imagine how she looked – eyes shot through with red and puffy, hair in disarray.

He looked down at his hands and then flicked a speck of imaginary dust off her desk. Finally, he looked her in the eye, face solemn and drawn.

“I just want to say that I’m really sorry.” He motioned to the stack of papers on her desk. “We’re all really sorry.” He focused once more at her desk. “Everyone likes you. And we didn’t…we didn’t know we were hurting you. We’ll be better.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded for a moment. Then smiled. It was tremulous, true, and she could still taste the salt from her tears in her mouth, but it was a real, genuine smile.

“Thank you. I really appreciate that.” Her voice shook with unshed tears, though now for a different reason. “And it’s ok. Tomorrow is a new day. It’ll be a good one.” She surprised herself with that statement. She’d mostly said it to fill up the awkward silence that had cropped up, but was surprised to find that she both meant it and believed it.

He nodded at her, face still serious, then shuffled quickly out of her class.

She smiled once more and grabbed the stack of papers on her desk. Paper after paper contained apologies and promises to be better; many contained phrases similar to the one her student had just uttered – we didn’t realize we were hurting you.

She sat back, contemplating the day. She was embarrassed by what had happened – mortified was probably closer to the truth, really – and she didn’t see that changing any time soon. And it wouldn’t do at all to constantly burst into tears at the end of every long day. She would need to toughen up in that regard, keep a closer watch on her emotions that were always so easily bubbling over the surface. But, surprisingly, other than the mortification she felt…okay. No, she was not a superhero, or an impenetrable wall, or a stone statue. But she was also not a fraud or fake or an impostor.

She was just a person who was sometimes sad, sometimes joyful; with skin that was sometimes too thin but with a heart big enough for all her students.

She was only human, and now everyone knew it.

And that was just fine.

 

All that I didn’t want.

 I suppose in the end it’s almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things. What’s harder – what’s much, much harder – is to accept what you actually did do.
//Peter Hook

---

I have already decided
not to be honest about it all.
The honesty would kill you, I reason to myself.
I plan out every moment of the conversation.
I convince myself that honesty is not always the best policy;
that they also say how much the truth can hurt, too.
And isn’t that what I want? To hurt you in the least possible way
(I ignore that niggling voice in my head
that screams about how much I’ve hurt you already.)

Later, when all my pretty plans come crashing down,
and I wring myself out of all the things I could have said –
wishing that I hadn’t been struck so dumb by the enormity of your question
(later knowing that at least in this one last moment,
we’d finally both gotten what we’d deserved all along) –
I realize that the truth reads like empty lines off a script,
and the lies sound like the real reasons:

It’s not you, it’s me (truth)
You can really do much better (truth)
I’m just not right for you (truth)
You deserve something more (truth)
I just don’t love you anymore (lie)

It’s bad enough
that I cannot, do not tell the truth.
Even though it’s what you deserve to hear.
But what’s worse is that when the moment comes –
I cannot lie.
Even though the truth is so much less than what you deserve
(and so shattering.)

“Did you ever love me?” You ask, voice pleading, eyes glassy with unshed hope.

A thousand responses flood my brain,
each one weaker than the last:
Who wouldn’t?
I should’ve.
I wanted to.
I really tried.

All the beautiful lies congeal, turn to glue in my throat.
I can’t spit them out but I can’t swallow them either, even though I’m desperate to
so that I can drudge up shiny new ones, old ones, bad ones.
Anything but this black silence.
Anything but the betrayal blooming in your eyes.
There are no sounds but the ticking clock – the judgment of a just god.
A god who let me feed our past with elegant deceptions,
but won’t let me choke the future with them any more.

Sometimes, I think of alternate versions of this story –
One where you never ask that question because I tell you the whole, ugly truth to begin with
and you leave hating me immediately, just as I deserve.
But I breath a sigh of relief, because finally, finally my mouth is not a traitor.
Or else, one where I reply immediately, honestly,
and you leave heartbroken and angry, which is still less than I deserve.
But I slump into the couch any way, lighter than before, because at last I’m not bound by my reviling deceptions.
But in the here and the now
in the truth of the situation –
I am only tricked into honesty,
my silence giving you everything I didn’t want you to hear.
And as you leave, betrayed and blindsided, I am crushed by my own foolish, traitorous heart
burdened by the knowledge that I could never, and now will never, give you the honesty that you deserve.

When you marry

When you first marry, they tell you all sorts of things
(they being your mother, your aunties, and all the women you never wanted to listen to)
most of all the mantra seems to be
“pick your battles.”

but when you’re young this advice seems impossible.
everything seems important –
how are you supposed to pick?

it’s infuriating the way he never puts the clothes in the hamper
or wears his shoes all over the house
the dishes are never washed
and you always have to walk the dog.

but eventually you do realize that some battles are more important
and you come to a peaceable agreement –
or at least an armistice
(he keeps his clothes on the floor of the extra bedroom, which you almost never go into; his shoes at least never come off in the bedroom; you wash the dishes and he puts them away; you now walk the dog together at night – he does it in the morning to give you time before work)

so you have learned to pick your battles.

but what they never told you is how many battles you would fight
but not have to fight alone.
marriage is not just about choosing your battles
but realizing that you now have an ally
a field commander
a general
and place to go home to.

the battles of work
and friends
family and just
life
in all the various shit it throws at you.
those you no longer fight alone.

so yes, you must learn to pick your battles
within the marriage, within the home.
but you never have to find an ally
for battles you’ve always had to fight alone.

Early morning

This morning I ran my hands through your hair while you slept. Or, maybe, you were only half asleep and didn’t mind the hands slipping through the strands.

In the mornings with your wild hair and soft eyelashes, I like to reflect on our marriage. On loving you.

I think – maybe if you hadn’t sat next to me, if I hadn’t said yes to breakfast, if you hadn’t decided to walk with me that one day – then I would never get to shape that dark haired, ever-changing mass you sometimes grow out longer than mine is now; sometimes buzz so short that my fingers skate over, don’t glide through.

Your hair which curls when you grow it out so long, so thick that sometimes my fingers get stuck and I have to gently comb out the tangles. I am jealous of it, at times. Me, with my stick straight hair, so thin and fine that it could never hold a curl when it was long. Your hair is thick and wavy, I can curl it with my fingers and it stays; if we have a daughter one day, I hope she has your hair. (Though perhaps she would wish for hair that was more manageable; I can picture her wailing about hair that never lays flat, that grows up and out rather than straight and down. I will laugh and say that her father’s hair is one of my favorite things about him and then I will kiss you right on the lips, while she sticks out her tongue in disgust and looks away.)

I am glad to be the one to wake up with your hair tickling my nose. Happy to get to run my hands through it when you are sad, or need help falling asleep, or have a headache. I am glad that it is all my own, that you are all my own, that I love someone so much I wrote an ode to their hair.

Somehow

Somehow when I wasn’t looking it all of a sudden became June.

In a little over a month I will be standing in front of a classroom, staring at 30 or so 13 and 14 year olds who are expecting me to teach them something.

How terrifying and exciting that seems.

A simple song

But what do I mean, love more?

I mean, love the people closest to you better. Love them when they’re happy, and especially when they’re sad. But most of all, love them when they are at their most unlovable. Love them harder when they are bordering on meanness. Love them more openly when they’ve shut you out. Love them more honestly when you feel like they’re lying to everyone, most of all themselves. Love will not fix them or it or all. Love itself will not fix anything or make it run smoother or work better. But without love, without the decision to say – yes, I will love this person even though I am busy and they are dull, or even though they are sad and I am not, or even though they are angry and bordering on mean, or even though it is so hard and I think, shouldn’t love be easier than this? – there will never be a better or a smoother or a more. There will only be another sad, lonely person, desperate for love and denied it.

Love. Always, as much as you can hold.

I mean, love yourself more. Remember that you deserve happiness. That you deserve forgiveness. Love yourself by being honest with those who love you and taking to heart their best intentions for you. Love yourself by rewarding yourself for things done right, taking compliments graciously, allowing yourself a day off here and there. Love yourself by accepting that you’ve done wrong, by working to improve yourself every single day – not for others, but because to stagnate is to die. Life is change, improvement, work. Every day – it is the only way to live.

Love yourself by growing. By accepting that change is real and necessary. Welcome it.

I mean, love those that would be too easy to hate, or write off, or brush aside. Because they are not the people who are like you, or what you’d like to be, or how you see the world. Because maybe, maybe, maybe you feel they don’t deserve love. But deserving is a long and winding road – a treacherous one. Resolve to say that you do not know his or her heart; what plagues them; what worries them; what ails them; what keeps them up at nights; what they regret. If you cannot, do not, will not know their heart, how will you ever know what they deserve?

Above all – just love someone.

Auld Lang Syne

The scene is New Year’s Eve. A house that once was home to five people is currently filled with close to fifty, ranging from 2 (almost 3!) to over 75.

It’s a frigid (for Phoenix, at least) 43 degrees outside. Too cold for anyone to venture out to the spacious patio (perhaps next year there will be outdoor heaters). Which means that it’s more than a little difficult to move around the home comfortably, but that’s fine — these are all people who are used to being close to one another. Some are lounging in the barely heated garage. Most are milling about in the two front rooms, listening to the sounds of whatever song someone has decided to sing on the karaoke. Most likely it is some love song circa 1960, though occasionally the song choice ventures into the 1980’s and late 90’s.

You’ve already sung a rather rousing rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart and performed with your cousins a lively, if rather low-scoring, version of Everybody by the Backstreet Boys. You like to think that what you lack in singing talent you at least make up for in enthusiasm. You’ve danced to Footloose (badly, but again — enthusiastically!), ate more beef than you think it healthy for your poor stomach (a fact that will be confirmed the next day), and just generally spent a lot of time laughing and smiling.

It occurs to you that four or five years ago, spending New Year’s Eve with your family, at your parent’s house, would have sounded dreadful to you. Would’ve been a fact that you would have found slightly embarrassing to mention to most people. Oh, how things have changed! How else would you want to spend New Year’s, you think? Outside, somewhere, wearing some too-short, sparkly dress and too cold to be happy? Or else, too drunk to remember how you were feeling at all? That’s what sounds and seems dreadful to you now.

What you are, here, is wrapped in the arms of the man of you love the most, surrounded by the people who love you the most. You are warm, maybe overly so, in a house filled with perhaps more people that a fire marshal would approve of and filled with home-cooked food made with kindness and care. You are comfortable enough and happy enough to sing badly (multiple times) and dance poorly (multiple times) and yet end up getting applauded any way for your effort. You sing and worship the Lord, think about the past year, hope for blessings for the upcoming year. You count down to the 2013 with 50 or so other people, and then kiss the man you agreed to marry at this exact moment three years ago while the entire room cheers and blows their noisemakers and claps loudly(you know it’s obviously not for the two of you, but it makes for a nice backdrop anyway). The first few minutes of 2013 are filled with hugs and kisses and picture-taking; they are filled with fireworks and noisemakers and smoke in the air; they are filled with the sounds of a crowd of people attempting to sing Auld Lang Syne but only knowing those three words to the song. They are filled with happiness. They are filled with love.

This is the way you end out 2012 and start 2013. You can’t think of a better way to do so.

Happy 2013 everyone. May it be a blessed one.