I turned forty today. Here’s a picture of me, not for posterity, but for vanity.
We do not write memento mori in birthday cards, but it’s always written in the sky and in the dust. We buried my cousin when he was thirty three. Age is not a guarantee or a safeguard or anything else except a gift. Some parents complain time is a thief, but this is not true. Time is not a thief; time is a gift we do not treasure as deeply as we ought.
My four-year-old woke up shrieking this morning, yelling, “The sun has turned its light on, and I do not know why!” It has been a dark January, and we forget the sun exists. We are arrogant, we are small, and “not as strong as we think we are.
On the last day of school, my cousin died. In a stupor, I took my final exam, but all I could think was “мой двоюродный брат ha muerto. Gospod, se usmili.
I was a jumble of multiple languages, stuck in the spin cycle.
When I was eight, I came to America, land of the unlimited condiments. A precocious brush with history prepared me for Ponce de León’s springs of water, but none of my books had prepared me for America’s ketchup spouts. And yet, there they were, like mythical fountains of eternal wealth, on fast food countertops spread with bins of sugar packets and cups of red plastic sticks, in a land where burglars and kings battled for America’s hearts and stomachs.
It’s March, but the vast majority of our usually-vibrant shrubs and bushes bear no hint of green. They’re merely a shell of twigs, flanked by a halo of decaying leaves.
In late December, we were hit with a sudden blast of cold weather. While Tennessee is no stranger to seasonal snowfall, this icy blast was different. The cold blew in far more rapidly than usual, very quickly pushing temperatures below zero, where they remained for days. Plants and trees plunged from comfortable weather to Arctic chill so rapidly the liquid inside instantly froze, causing stems, branches, and sapling trunks to split open and die. The plant cells spontaneously combusted — in ice, not in fire [1].
It takes courage to be an essayist, to wake up every day with the resolve to tack enough damp words to paper until some stick. I don’t have that kind of courage, because I don’t take the time to gather words in the morning dew. I don’t stoop down and collect any for myself. I hand out words along with stacks of folded laundry and spoonfuls of spaghetti sauce, but I don’t collect them. I grade them, sort them, translate and even barter them, but I keep none.
The Poetry Pub is hosting a November Poem-a-Day challenge. I’m not sure I’ll participate every day this month, but we’ll see! It’s good to stretch my writing muscles in a non-commercial, non-blogging way. You can see the prompts for each day of the challenge here, on The Poetry Pub’s Instagram account. The first prompt was “hello”, and here’s what I wrote —
When I was a girl, the grocery stores started to run out of food.
They didn’t tell you that, because it was a corner of the world you’re not supposed to understand, and they don’t tell you how to become a writer, either. Everyone is supposed to become a reader — they tell you that in school — but it remains a mystery how some readers are able to metamorphose into writers.
After all, the writer concerns himself with not just the reason why civilizations fall, but also the American supermarket, the meaning in dappled bananas on the counter at sunrise, the effervescence of this present moment, and using words incorrectly.
No one teaches you how to be writer, except maybe poets and historians.
We start the school year inside one set of walls, and wind it down inside a new set of walls down an old-new highway, further away from the maddening din. We fling open the curtains and let in the newfound light as we hold the books in our hands. Our left hands grow heavier and our right hands grow lighter and lighter as we creep toward the end of the school year, page by page by page.
We rearrange the shelves and fold paint over the walls and fold up sweaters and make the beds and unroll rugs and dream of where we’ll plant sunflowers and cherry tomatoes.
The coffee maker hums and my brain runs back and forth, jumping from track to track: eleven-year-old and two-year-old, eldest and youngest, deodorant and diapers. I swing from Chinese to Greek to toddler English, drawing brackets around grand middle-grade essays and then enunciating consonants and vowels for the smallest little friend. The light rises and falls, rises and falls, rises and falls.
Outside, the news rages. Zealots call for cancellation, call for vengeance, scream at you for the wrong kind of silence or the wrong kind of words, screaming for no reason at all. We all weep. The news cycle drains and spins, drains and spins, drains and spins.
Inside, we sing: Kyrie, eleison.
The marquee at the gas station around the corner winds up. I look away. Someone texts more doom, another soundbite, more fire and ice — another way the world will end.
Music floats in and out and in again. I reach, and grab it.
We press on: dishes and poetry, mopping and tantrums, sunrise and bedtimes.
The Oaxacaborn Blog 