September 2018: End of Summer
A few weeks ago Emily and I were cleaning out some things in our apartment and I found a poem. It was ripped from the New Yorker in that tell tale font, the page folded so that the poem was framed by a slight margin. I had forgotten all about it but also knew it instantly: it was a poem I’d tacked to the bulletin board by my desk my last year as a teacher. I could picture it against the green butcher paper, the single thumb tack, the way it would go crooked sometimes. I remember tearing it out because I loved the melancholy it contained, the exact sentiment I could feel as summer wound down, every year. There was also a gentle promise to it. The end of August would always mark my arrival in New York, and when I tacked the poem to the board in my last windowless classroom, it was like a symbol of still existing here.
There was a day that fall that I entered my classroom to find one of the assistant principals standing by my desk, bent over to read the poem. I froze, as I always did, afraid that I’d done something wrong, or was about to do something wrong, or was already in trouble for doing something wrong. Fear, unfortunately, was the guiding mindset of my brief time as a teacher. By the time I was twenty four, in this classroom with the poem by my desk, I’d gotten sober but still couldn’t shake the fear.
The assistant principal straightened up when she heard me come in. She smiled, then pointed at the poem. “This is lovely,” she said. I was mortified (and also delusional) that she would ask me if I wrote it, forgetting that the name of the poet was clearly on the bottom, and forgetting further more that no one at the school knew I was a writer. It felt like just another secret identity that I had to hide from everyone: alcoholic, lesbian, writer. This is part of why teaching was so exhausting, because I thought I could only keep my job if I performed, if I buttoned up, if I split myself into pieces. But what was most uncomfortable in that moment was being seen. Hanging a poem for yourself on a bulletin board was not something many teachers did. The bulletin boards were for bubble letters, posters about multiplication, student essays stapled in neat rows. A teacher my first year had showed me how to arrange all the essays on a slant, stapled twice so that they rippled and rose up in the middle. It looked bizarre but the principal loved it. The small section of bulletin board I’d decorated for myself was so unorthodox: the poem, a to do list, a post card from a friend in Spain, a photo strip showing myself with friends, mouths open wide in laughter. That year I’d spent money on a poster of a butterfly with a quote about diversity and got it laminated to hang up, as if the butterfly or the quote could telegraph my true self. The only reason I’d assumed I could hang such personal items without consequence is because I thought I was invisible. But here was another adult admiring what I’d chosen, wanting to talk about it.
I’d forgotten about the poem, and I’d forgotten that I’d kept it. I’d left that classroom in what had been a haze. It was January, the fall having tapered off into a depression that kept me cemented to my bed. I’d managed to find another job, something low key, and so I’d quit. I couldn’t remember packing up my things, taking down the butterfly poster, untacking the poem and tucking it in my bag. The majority of things I left there: books, rolls of scalloped borders for the bulletin boards, packs of magic markers, magnets on the chalk board. It was like leaving a life you knew in your heart you'd never be a part of again. I told myself and others that I was just taking a break from teaching, that I'd eventually go back, but I never did.
When I found the poem I put it on our fridge. Here I am, in another version of myself, ten years gone from that depressed twenty something walking on eggshells through the world. I've written a whole book about those years as a teacher, but my relationship with the book is uneasy, my relationship with those years uneasy. I judge myself harshly. Finding the poem, yellowed with age, has helped me towards forgiveness. Here is September, another clean slate, another fresh year. Here is the poem that filled me when I was young. Here it is again now, still potent.
xo,
c
* Save the date: On October 15 I'll be reading at Powerhouse Arena for their Memoir Monday series. More details to come! xo