Memory of Fire (TinyLetter Archive)

Dear ones, 

Today when the bell rang for lunch, I went to the teachers’ lounge to get my bento box from the fridge. I came back to my room and sat in front of my laptop, rather unused to the silence. In Florida, I regularly spent lunches in my room, as there was never enough time to get anything done and I often had to keep working. Today I needed quiet. Tuesdays I go 7:50-3:05 without a break and yesterday I got some awful news. News that a dear woman, a woman I barely knew but who was loved by my oldest friend’s father, the man who showed me Hafiz and Rumi and who found a woman with a gentle soul that matched his own, his beloved took her life. But you can't take off from work for mirror neurons forming into grief or empathy. Can't say, I need to stay home because my heart is broken for one of the best adults I knew as a child, for his loss, for his children’s loss, for this hole I feel because there are guns that take beautiful, kind, gentle people away from us. I can't say, I need to stay home because I heard “Jeremy” on the radio yesterday and burst into tears, and because Eduardo Galeano died, and you probably don't know who he is, but he showed that history lives, that stories are truth, that everyone has a story, that everyone is true, and this woman who died was a story that was true and mostly unknown to me. And I need to grieve that. To grieve what none of us knew that allowed her to be taken.

So when a student came bursting into my class about 10 minutes later, I was not happy to see him and not in a state of mind to engage. But he was relentless, asking me questions about my spring break, about what I was eating, if it was Indian food, because it looks like Indian food, and he's so tired of Indian food because that's all his parents ever cook. And then a friend came in to join him. Her grandfather only eats salads. Three salads a day. And then another of my students. Man, Miss Abel, if I ever want to see what healthy eating is like I just go to your Instagram page. But seriously, is that all you're eating? And they surrounded me. With talk, with laughter, with offers to add lavender to my food. And despite my best efforts to stay alone, I couldn't. All year I'd never once been in my room at lunch but this one day, when I was most sad, the kids came and found me. All I can think is that while I was busy wishing there was something I could do for my friends in Texas, my students were actually doing it for me. 

Yours,

Bento but not Alone