All I Want Is a Room Somewhere

You knew that teaching public school would be hard. Friends had done it; you'd visited their houses and seen the stacks of papers, knew they would work til 9 every night, that they were fulfilled and exhausted. But now the knowledge is carnal. You know in the sense of knowing a woman. It is a body knowledge that has settled in, and which you can not unlearn.

You teeter between emotional extremes--outrage that you have been set up to fail, that there is no way you can't not fail some of your students, that you will be unable to get to the point of even treading water until at least June, and relief that it is you doing this insane work for the students and not the woman who only shows PowerPoints about books or stories, rather than the books themselves. But still you struggle to stave off apathy, the urge to show a movie rather than give one more thing you have to grade. You lose your knack for metaphor. There is no metaphor for this exhaustion, for the way your brain feels after so many months of not sleeping. Your mind is filled with only the word No. You say it out loud sometimes. When an email comes asking you to go to another meeting. No. When you think of what can't be done. No. When you think of your student who fell between the cracks, who should be in IB and not regular classes, but isn't because he's poor. No, no, no. You mete it out, know there's only so many times you can say it to others before they think you don't want to be here. And these other times, you smile, think _____.

Of late, your pleasures are small and few. After a day of teaching, you sit in silence, let hours roll past until the last possible moment needed to cobble together a lesson plan. More than ever before, the contrast between working and personal life is enormous. You shrink from conversations with even your best friends. From one more minute of using your voice. Personal life means life alone. Ascetic pleasures have become your main respite, and everything else, negligible. A bag of oranges picked at night from your uncle's orchard: bliss. The earth-taste of your gunpowder green tea: unparalleled. You begin to think, who needs sex? when there is this taste in the world. Maybe it is just as good. Maybe the monks were on to something.

Still, your version includes a bit more. A hotel room alone, a haircut, massage. A good thrift store in Orlando. Bags and bags of coffee you'll stow away to make it through to the end of the year. Art, in person, instead of your computer. And finally, maybe, a day for yourself.