telegram from park slope

The babies are still kicking and the strollers are still charging iPhones and I am still excelling at work avoidance and questioning how much I really value responsibility; I am still wishing I was lying in the crook of your arm and your chest, nestled into your scent, seeped in with sun on some roof or patch of green grass, and I'm hoping we can recreate the scene with imagined sunlight and crumpled sheet green grass tonight in my bed in Gowanus. This is all to say that this weekend has been wonderful but I miss doing nothing at all with you and going nowhere and I hope that we can do that very soon. 

Letter

I'm writing what I'm sure will be an inordinately long letter, which I'm not quite sure I'll ever send. It's something I've done to every lover I've ever had -- which is not to belittle the act or my love for you, for you are the first love who I have fallen in love with, distinctly, unquestionably, not in shades as I waited and watched, like boiling water, but with sudden immersion into something whose closest relative may be pain. Already I'm sure I can't send this to you. See, I'm sitting here in a long green hallway in the school where I work which has never felt so removed from the rest of the world. Coney Island; middle school in general; the particular breed of education reform embraced by charter schools like this one. Part of the problem is that I forgot headphones, somewhere between racing to yoga and racing to your place and waking up at 5:20 am to catch the J to the F to almost the end of the line, here where the trains end at empty beaches under the shadows of the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel. 

Down the hall the kids at the district school are arguing about something and it's raising the hairs on all of our necks because our kids are silent in their classrooms, taking the tests that will measure their aptitude as students (and ours as teachers.) 

I can still taste you, or smell the taste of you, not quite on my lips but somewhere close enough to get a breath, maybe imagined, every so often. 

The truth is I feel really hopeless about what I'm doing, and by "what I'm doing" all I mean is what I do by day, which shouldn't necessarily necessitate the type of feelings that I'm having now of black and white, right or wrong, fit or misfit. And this green hallway is packed to the ceiling with the ghosts of rich middle school moments. Where Peaches practiced her poem outside my classroom. Where Zaria kicked Kadin in the crotch. Where a kid from the other school said, "you's an ugly-ass teacha" to my face. Where Adam writhed on the floor before he got expelled. Where Eartha put on layers and layers of lipgloss. It's silent, now, in this end of the hall, but I can see and hear what's happened here and it not black and white but stained with every color. 

This isn't the end of the story. This is the end of this letter. It wasn't inordinately long.