A significant number of days have passed since last I wrote. In the meantime I write constantly. My fingers depress and release the keyboard’s own knucklebones. I am writing to and for various people and, having written, I forget what I have said. Muscles that might fight the forward drift of my shoulders, spine, and ribs forget themselves. I do nothing I can remember, nothing that is quite true. I feel myself waiting for this to be written and feel, too, my failure at not having already written it. Even as I begin, time falls thick and indivisible, folding on itself as honey does, and weighs like the long silence which precedes news that I am no longer loved. But I am the silent one. And I am the one who is waiting.
It is hard to begin. Many things have happened. Here we will see them as slowly they fall (or rise) into view.
1. I’m leaving my classroom at the end of June. I’m going back to working at a desk. Here at the school, near children but not with them. I’m doing this for the money, really. And other reasons too acrid for this space.
2. I leave my classroom at 12:30 every day, just after lunch. I go to my office which is hot and where I am visible across distances through panes of glass. My office is filled with boxes of things indiscriminately packed. I am replacing someone who left mid-stride several months ago. I am displaced by someone who wanted my predecessor’s office and now has it. I am in the small, small office where people tap at the door all afternoon, they see me sitting with my back to the boxes, sweating through my email, pressing the phone to my ear, adding to and subtracting from my to-do list. By close of day I do not remember what I have done.
3. Hanauta spends hours after school in that office with me now. Somewhat miserably. What have I done? I will not have a classroom anymore. No more weeks of freedom in the summer, either.
4. The course I took is over, that is good. I don’t know when I will organize the materials and pack them up or cull the things I might use in my work. Everything (articles, books, notes, folders) lies along the window wall behind me as I type this, everything (I forget what I have learned) lies askew like badly sheaved heaps of wheat – or grass clippings, raked clumsily to the side.
5. It seemed imperative to remove my long, lonely hair. I had 12 inches cut in an act that was not really tonsuring, but was something more than a hair cut. The severed braid lies in an envelope on top of the course work crap heap, waiting to be mailed to Locks of Love.
The thought of ever again entering the post office and waiting in that line of slow and needful people. That thought tires me.
5. a. I wait in line, not on line. There is no line to wait (ON) except the one we agree to make by standing (IN IT.) This is a matter of regional dialect (and free will), matters about which I have strong feelings.
6. Aisha was out for a week. I was scared she would not come back. Her mother is hard to read, but I heard rumors. Aisha whom I love too much. Somewhere along the ribbon of our time this year, as it falls and folds in on itself, she learned something about appearances, or trust, or the discontinuous seam of truth that we seek but can never uncover from root to tip. She used, earlier in the year, to say, “There’s my ‘I’ for Aisha.” But now she writes “A” on her drawings. She says, “There’s my ‘A’…”
7. Nereida was out for a month. I despaired of ever seeing her again. Now she is back. Shouting, speaking in the voices of the adults in her life, leaping up to dance on tables and, when excited, confusedly shaking her head back and forth or swinging it in circles as if to induce a trance.
8. I cross the street holding Hanauta’s hand. In the western glare of the afternoon, about 10 feet above us in the air, are brightly shifting motes of dust. I wonder if they are casting the most fleeting and merest of shadows on the blackened roadway below. I wonder if they wish to fall and rest, or wish to go on winding through that space just above us, or whether they aspire to higher spheres. I cross the street.
9. A white enamel sauce pan we have had for many years has recently, irrevocably, been marked with a black shadow, where one burn, two burns, have formed over the stove’s blue rings (the burners!) I scrape away parts of the sticky carbon plaque, but a network of dark static remains and burn begets burn. Anything, however gently cooked in this pot, now blackens – as inevitably as my face appears when I step before a mirror.
10. Hiroki’s father’s father died. I express my sympathy. H’s father wears his skateboard strapped to his back so that we can read the stickers on the underside of the deck including: “PRACTICE SAFE SEX: GO FUCK YOURSELF.” Hiroki’s mother drops him off and there is trouble. Hiroki is wrung with paroxysms of grief on parting from her. He wants to go to work with her and make money, he says. “I want to GO, I want to GO!” I cannot comfort or fully calm him. He tells me he wants his friends to step on his body and give him boo-boos. My head hurts. The security guard comes from the lobby to smile at him and offer unctuous and uneasy platitudes. My assistant manages him and later explains to me what I have done wrong. With such easy authority. I have been reading a book about play therapy for children. He is a child in need of this – space and time to symbolize and then conceptualize what it is that troubles him so profoundly.
11. One night Hanauta performs Auld Lang Syne at her recorder recital. I weep at her steadiness – her deeply sober air. Her father, Hanapappa, is there. He gives us a ride home which we love. It is as though we are a family, really. Really safe together, mobile, easy. We listen to Hanapapa lie to his wife on the phone, he does not say he is with us, he says he is still on the bridge, he says he will be right home. I remember so much, having long since symbolized and conceptualized my truth. I wonder whether Hanauta is listening, is thinking about the lie.
12. The switching track in our train set confuses all the children and me, you can't connect tracks to it, it's just a beautiful delta leading to a notchless void. I hide it, sometimes, when we are laying the meander of our routes. Sometimes it bothers me that we cannot make accommodations for trains which want to strike off into a new direction. But we may all be too afraid to do that. Anyway.
13. At a certain point it’s just time to be done. I turn off the computer. I have a feeling of burning, like having snorted water, that raw distress. Yes, burns magnetize burns. What helps, I think, is the coolness of time, quietly falling.
14. Yesterday a slender linden limb fell into the roadway and lay brightly in the sun, the leaves turning up their silver sides as the wind drove east. I approached with awe or caution and lifted the long branch, high to clear the bodies of cars at curbside. The limb was very light and wieldy. I did not want it to be crushed by the buses which drone past our house, I did not want anyone else to have the feel of lifting it. I left it propped against its own old trunk. It rested, dappled by the leaves which had at one time surged beneath it. Yellow and white, with fugitive delicacy, its blossoms were revealed between long-eaved bracts.
