November

Somehow it became Christmas time overnight. I was walking to the Metro station last week to find that three giant, fully decorated Christmas trees have appeared in my neighborhood. I went to school on Tuesday (our first day back after Thanksgiving break) to find the single largest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen inside a building that’s not a mall or an airport. The Mother’s Club spent half the day hanging wreaths throughout the halls, and I looked out the window while teaching one of my classes to find a complete nativity scene in the circle drive by the main office. Teaching at a Catholic school apparently means that your workplace turns into a Hallmark movie setting. And I’m happy about it. I didn’t feel well yesterday, so I went to Whole Foods for some soup and came home with a Christmas tree. I think we could all use a bit of holiday spirit right now. 

November has been the strangest month. I felt like it kept offering things that it never gave. I turned 27 a few weeks ago, but I mostly ignored my birthday since it was the day before the election. I spent my birthday weekend volunteering for Clinton’s campaign, and then I spent a few days in a sort of numb shock afterward. 

There are few places I can think of more depressing than a DC high school the day after the election. I went to work in a daze and sat down in the English department room where my coworkers silently trickled in. We gave each other weak smiles and raised eyebrows instead of real hellos and we sat without talking until one of my coworkers finally voiced what all of us were thinking—“What am I supposed to say to the kids? What do I say?” Which no one had an answer for. Some teachers let their kids talk about it in class that day. Others let their students journal on a piece of paper that they were then free to rip up. I didn’t know how to talk about it that day, so I tried to avoid it instead, which went about as well as you might imagine. One of my 9th graders asked quietly from the front row, “Ms. Smith, how did this happen?” and I had to say, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” 

I stayed in DC for Thanksgiving and spent half of Wednesday volunteering for the Salvation Army. My official job was to register other signed-up volunteers (check their name off the list and give them an apron or t-shirt), which I did while having an intense 4-hour conversation with two of my fellow volunteers (one of whom is a delightful woman in her 60s who embraced me before I left, told me that she thought we were long-lost sisters, and who declared us new best friends). On Thanksgiving day I made a pan of cornbread dressing and ate more of it than I will ever publicly confess to. I thought of some really excellent ways to procrastinate grading the giant stack of essays I brought home. One of my friends and I watched Fantastic Beasts together, and by together I mean we went to screenings of the same movie at the same time, even though we are 10 hours apart. This worked very well, except his theater showed one extra trailer, so my movie was about two minutes ahead, which meant I kept accidentally texting spoilers. I went to Annapolis. I went to Alexandria. I finished half a dozen college candidate interviews. I watched Gilmore Girls.  

I had to say a hard goodbye to a friend who’s moving away for work last night. Even though I’ve known I would have to say this goodbye for a long time, it didn’t make it any easier. I’m bad at goodbyes. I either want to avoid them altogether and sneak away unnoticed, or I want to prolong them indefinitely and create a spectacle of melodrama and too many words (which I stop myself from actually doing). The result is always underwhelming and full of things I mean to say but don’t. What feels like the real goodbye exists in my mind, but what plays out in real life is something else. It happens more than is fair that there are no words that would mean the right thing. 

I hang on hard to things. People, places, moments. I exist in a perpetual state of nostalgia and what I enjoy in the present I recognize as fodder for future nostalgia. Scorpios have the longest memory of all the signs supposedly, and I am the truest of Scorpios for my tendency to replay and replay and replay and remember everything. But November, for once, I’d be alright letting go of.