Fall 2021

An instructor once told me I breathe like a Honda Civic.

It’s true—something happens to my lungs down there, and to the body around them. I sink, I slow, I stretch time like taffy. This is my first night dive, and the dark water is heavy with peace. I could lift up the ocean floor and slip between its sheets, head on a pillow of sargassum.

The patience, the sense of adventure, the joy, the willingness to do and go and have fun—those things are all more forced now.

The things that come easy are less pleasant: Anger, frustration, raised voices, time outs, No. In the After, I try to create adventure for Miles and Greta—we sled in the winter, we build snowmen, we do experiments in the kitchen, we play outside for hours when the sun shines, we build forts in the dining room. But we don’t go to the zoo much anymore.

Little Stevie was my age and his music stayed in step with me for a long time.

I understood his growing pains, his triumphs. With each breakthrough album I would think, yes, I know what he is trying to say. I was thankful to have him along on my journey. I felt blessed.

I still listen to those same albums on a little record player that was spared from the school trash bin last year. I catch glimpses of the person I was back then, hungry for a full life. Stevie’s music fed me. I hear the crackles and scratches and gently appraise them—the same way I do my own wrinkles and gray hairs.

I’m happier than the morning sun, Stevie sings.

When the album ends, the needle repeats a soft thud as it hits the record label. I have heard this sound—this thump-thump—my entire life. It calls to me, change the record or turn me off, act!

The first therapist I unwillingly went to had me lie on a brown, scratchy carpet and recall my earliest memory.

I told her about standing by a window looking over our backyard, and hoped she would interpret that as me being self-aware, observant. She nodded, pen in hand.

I’d taken that memory from a picture of myself in a baby album. I don’t remember it at all.

I step into the frozen foods aisle that houses desserts on one side, breakfast items on the other. On the upper shelf are buckets of cookies the same shade as that carpet. Some weeks they find their way into my basket, my sweet tooth overriding my wallet. Today, I’m not sure what my taste buds want, so I keep moving. Further down are the full-on meals—single serving or family style. I’m not exaggerating when I say those meals saved my life. They still do.

The first therapist I willingly went to told me I was fine. My nana had died two days before and I was in the midst of a relationship that was quickly teaching me to stay silent. I went home and had a glass of wine, then six. Purple vomit coated the insides of the toilet as I registered that the bottle was empty. This therapist recently tried to add me on LinkedIn.

In my pocket, I carry a yellow plastic whistle that can be heard from a mile away.

Every survival guide lists a whistle as an essential item. I have one on my keychain as well. They came in a three-pack. I wear two pairs of socks inside my purple insulated boots for warmth and blister protection. Since I’m always cold, I have a thin layer of black silks under my clothes to hold in my body heat. To keep my neck warm, I have a purple buff, and stuffed in my jacket pocket are my green suede mittens. Nothing matches. Every purchase made for ease and warmth. Protection. There’s no need for snowshoes today, but I drop Yaktrax in the daypack, just in case. I run through each of these items fifteen times in my mind before I can leave the house and drive to the trailhead. One of many tics I’ve developed around cold.

We didn’t hear him come into the house over the music and our laughing. He must have kept a key when he moved out. Or perhaps their mother had left the door unlocked when she went to the store. But there he stood in the middle of the yellowed linoleum floor, fists on his hips and that too- wide, too-many-teeth, wolf-in-grandma’s- nightgown smile.

The person I once was—the ignorant young self who rode recklessly across open pastures—no longer exists.

The current version has a hip replacement and years of experience. My young students are shedding their old selves and creating new ones. They know, and I know, that sometimes you get bucked off.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sentences. Past. Present. Future. Some sentences are long. Some are short. Three years. Twenty- five years. Life.

I grew up in northwestern Oklahoma, on a treeless isolated farm. I yearned for city life and concrete sidewalks.

How did I end up at an east-coast maximum security prison surrounded by high walls, barbed wire, locked doors, and men in tan uniforms? The guys want an answer to that question.

“Why are you here,” one asks.

“I really don’t know,” I say.

I don’t tell them that the presidential election enraged me. Am I using theatre as an antidote?

We meet in a large room called the Library/Resource Center. Half of the room is a basketball court; I stand under the hoop.

“This is our theatre,” I say, “a sacred place.”

The world is a wet-leafed wonder of departing summer. Summer, who leaves without cleaning the mess she’s made. October’s business is the sweep.

Winter takes care of the rest. Then sleep, sleep tired world. A heavy spring may bring new life. If we put the orchard to bed properly, there will always be apples. If we thanked Eve, instead of damning her, trusted the snake that lives inside of us, perhaps we’d eat our way out of this.

Maybe there’s a way to make things better. Up until now we’ve been finding plenty of ways to make things worse.

Maybe a president will die. Or he won’t.

Maybe a country will dissolve. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Maybe falling into someone’s arms and hugging and hugging and kissing and kissing isn’t the worst thing you can do, even during a pandemic.

Maybe I will run away and join the circus. Maybe this is the circus.

Maybe school as we know it will end and school as we dream it can begin. Maria Montessori understood a hundred years ago. Follow the child. Despite our best efforts to poison their world, there are still children. Maybe it’s not too late to trace their footsteps, listen to their words, find the voices inside them that haven’t yet learned no, stop, you can’t, you shouldn’t, you mustn’t, but urge instead, yes, go, find, fix, feel, fly free.

Weak sunlight strikes the dull metal lockers, checkers the walls.

I begged for junior high, the land of first kisses and gymnasium dances, but it isn’t like the paperback novels or television. The new school comprises two buildings and a handful of trailers, grades seven through twelve jammed together like lab rats in a great maze. Here, paint peels, bus drivers curse and shriek. Corridors teem and swarm with teenagers—real ones—feral strangers in adult bodies. Fifteen and sixteen and eighteen, they are older than I will ever be. I’ve taken to playing dead, silent and still until they’ve roamed out of earshot. I’ve taken to ripping skin from my lips in shreds.

The relentless bleat of the alarm fades as we exit the building, arrange ourselves in clots along the sidewalk. I am scraping my new white tennis shoes against the pavement, counting the minutes left in Latin, when two hands yank my shoulders back, pin them sharply in place like the steel jaws of a trap clamping onto mouse flesh. I flail hopelessly as the owner of the hands leans in, grins, and says,

“Let’s get sexy.”