I think I’m empty. Like if you turned my pockets inside out apart from hay there would be only small scraps of soul and maybe the dream of some peanut butter.
My brain is packed with trying not to fuck up kindergarten
for 17 little people that I will never meet in person. We meet eye to eye
because we’re all on screens on tables and I forget that I’m not in a really
weird board meeting with elves. I feel like they’re all about 45 years old and
faking those baby teeth. The co-teacher saw them in person at a Saturday class
and said man they’re tiny.
I remember when being with kids was full of wonder, and
naps.
I trudge through trying to save the day of this life, my
marriage falling to the wayside, my 13 year old surfing the rafters, all of us
waiting for the shot to get away from
deathly illness and do something normal again like hand a pencil to someone at
the bank, or throw a Frisbee not just one way, but back too.
Some days I hold up the cheesecloth of my mom’s brain and I
can see the path she is taking and follow it. Some days there is no path there
is just sleeping. Some days she wrings her hands and doesn’t talk. Tonight she
looked down at her dog and said in a voice like a normal person, looking at
kids who come to the door with cookies for sale, she said Well Hello there
I dig through myself sometimes to make sure I’m still there,
remember me, I’m just some girl who once had a Barbie airplane. It was like a
little oval suitcase. It was so cool.
I was a little older than these kids in my class now. My
life was easy when I had a red drape for a closet door curtain and my Barbie
airplane was in there and my door was covered with Wacky Pack stickers. I think
about how my mom was making food for me in the other room, every few hours every
day then and I’m not sad that it has come to this very needy part of her life
now. I’m only sad when I think of all the conversations that aren’t possible
anymore.
I still have the love, I wrap her up in her sheets and
blankets at night and her skin is love.
In the mornings before school I have to get up to feed
horses and even though I don’t feel like it there is usually a sky that looks
like a dessert station at a god’s buffet. Fluffy, silent, draped in glitter.
Flamboyant and unapologetic and then it grows up into a regular sky, shedding
out The Village People for all day elevator music. Why does the sky hide like
that. Or save its spectacular for a few moments in the morning and a few
dazzles right at bedtime.
I guess even Houdini had to do some non-magical things like
hand someone a pencil at a bank.
My co-teacher is going to get her shot tomorrow so I’m in
the class with another sub (a two sub minimum tomorrow) and she texted me don’t stress.
If there is a glitch
there is a glitch. So what. Make mistakes.
Make mistakes. She said. The
teacher.
