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. 

Autumn

The first quarter of school has ended and autumn is here and I’m almost 27 years old. I keep accidentally lying when I tell people that I “just moved here” because it’s been two and a half months already. Even though I still don’t have my paintings on the wall or my landlord-required rug on the floor, my apartment has started to feel like home. 

DC keeps tossing me small gifts. It’s been a year and a half since I lived in a place full of chance encounters. I ran into a college classmate in a bookstore and another who I took my first creative writing workshop with and haven’t seen in about 7 years. I got to visit with another college friend who was in town for the weekend, and I got to go see one of my favorite teachers when he came to DC to promote his new book. I feel connected to strangers because I feel like there are fewer degrees of separation between us. It’s the same feeling that I felt in New York—that the world is both fuller and smaller.

 One of my oldest friends, James, came to visit last month. James and I haven’t lived in the same place for almost a decade, but when we’re together it feels like nothing’s changed. Those are the kind of friendships you want to hang onto. I forced upon him some new experiences. Like trying a vegan smoothie (which he liked!). And sweet potato fries (not impressed). And a square millimeter of chopped, raw tomato (also not impressed). We went kayaking on the Potomac and bike riding around the monuments, and I took him to see my favorite band which I have a secret hope is now his favorite band. He never complained about how I unintentionally tried to kill him by making him walk 12 miles on already-sore feet. 

Another friend, Elijah, came to visit a couple of weeks ago. Elijah is the type of human who you find standing in the middle of Union Station sketching the ceiling. He is the best expresser of the awe that I feel at things most people find mundane. A beautiful ceiling. The Metro. Street performers. Carrot cake. The right phrase. When someone expresses your feelings for you better than you do, it’s how you know you’ve found a friend. We browsed bookstores at midnight, got way too excited about the Library of Congress, biked around, and took a ghost tour. 

It’s nice to have friends visit to accompany me on my adventures. But here is a thing that I wish more people knew/believed—being alone should never stop you from having adventures. “I didn’t have anyone to go with” should never be a reason to not do something you want to do. Sometimes people act surprised at the things I do by myself. Yes, I did eat at that restaurant/go to that concert/tour a cemetery/take a road trip/bike 20 miles/hike up a mountain alone, and why should being alone have stopped me from doing any of it? (Unless you want to hike up a mountain that includes a rock scramble that the internet warns you may be too difficult for those 5 feet tall and shorter, which is a different story entirely. Just watch me, internet. Just watch.) There’s this weird stigma about doing things by ourselves that if I paid any attention to would have prevented be from ever even leaving Mississippi. And people are generally way too preoccupied with themselves to notice or care that your by yourself, so forget about the stigma. And doing things by yourself makes you appreciate your friends so much more when you do get to spend time with them.

I’m trying to get back to writing, so I looked up reading series in DC and submitted to one and was thrilled when they asked me to come read for them. I’ve only ever read in front of my classmates/friends who already know my work and who I trust to get what I mean. It is a nerve-wracking and liberating thing to read in front of complete strangers who you are half afraid of offending if the sarcasm doesn’t fall just right (or maybe even if it does). But there are few things more validating than when those strangers laugh at the right moments and tell you afterwards “I know just what you mean.” 

I opened my mailbox the other day to find one of the best surprised I’ve ever received—a Webb yearbook that my students from last year signed for me. The notes they wrote were some of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. I thought of emailing them or sending a letter to tell them how much their words meant to me, but I came to the conclusion that the words do not exist in the English language for me to fully express my gratitude and how I miss them, so I baked 100 brownies and mailed those instead. 

The leaves peaked in the Shenandoah over the past few weeks, so on a whim I got up too early last weekend and climbed a mountain to see some. October was a good one. 

Blog Posts I Started and Never Finished

1. The one where I hiked to this waterfall.

2. The one where I rode a bus from New Orleans to Atlanta to see one of my college roommates/favorite humans get married. The one where I reminisce about reunions and late-night talks and how random dorm room assignments 8 years ago brought together a (now) husband and wife and how absurd and beautiful relationships (all types of them) are. 

3. The one where I spent a night in New Orleans with three of my best friends and realized that I could not remember the last time that I was with more than one of my friends in the same city.

4. The one where I share some thoughts about women’s Olympic gymnastics.

5. The one where my sister found out she's having a girl. 

6. The one where I was, yet again, jobless until mid-August and then in a span of a few hours I got an interview (then a second, third, and fourth), and two days later a job offer. Then the one where I packed everything I could fit in my car in one day and drove to DC with no apartment or plan other than showing up at work two days later. 

7. The one where I crashed at a friend’s apartment while starting my job (5 days after all the other new hires started) while trying to find an apartment at the same time and teaching myself how to parallel park. 

8. The one where my new school is a Catholic school and I had to attend my first Mass afraid that I  would accidentally reveal to my new coworkers that I had no idea what was happening. 

9. The one where I found an apartment in Bethesda, which I only knew to be the home of the girls in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but is, in fact, a delightful town less than a mile from DC where everyone has enough money to attend $30 per visit exercise classes daily. 

10. The one where I attend a couple of said exercise classes (for the $15 first visit discount) and had some thoughts to share about them. 

11. The one where I slept on an air mattress in my empty apartment for 9 nights until my heroic parents drove a U-Haul here with my furniture, stayed exactly 24 hours, then had to go back home so they wouldn’t miss work. 

12. The one where I live next to a Capital Bikeshare stand (where you can rent city bikes) and have ridden something like 50 miles in the last three weekends. 

13. The one where I try to figure out how to teach 5 classes of over 20 students each when the largest class I’ve ever taught was 15. 

14. The one where I discover that I’ve somehow landed at one of the best high schools for athletes in DC. (Perhaps the country.) Which is not a thing I can ever say I imagined. 

15. The time where my car died in the school parking lot and no one could start it for three days, so I had to Uber to and from school until I finally got it towed to a repair place where they put in a new battery. 

16. The one where I finally finish unpacking and have an apartment that actually looks like a home. 

17. The one where I tell you all about DC and what it’s like to live here so far and how incredibly nice everyone is. 

18. The one where I describe each of the smoothies I splurge on every weekend. Because that truly deserves a post of its own. Though I will never confess how much I pay for them. 

Summer

I’m in a different state and town than I’ve ever lived in. The mountains outside the window of my classroom belong to the same range as the ones I used to live near. Nine hours apart and from opposite sides, but they still feel half familiar. 

I left my job in May after nearly ten months of knowing I would. It was a job I felt lucky to have and a job I really loved. But I left the rural south the first time because I no longer felt like it was where I belonged. I never really believed I could force myself to belong there again. 

Even though I couldn’t see myself in the rural south longterm, it wasn’t easy to willingly leave a job that I looked forward to every morning, or coworkers who welcomed me even when I was hired in a moment of desperation two days before school started and looked the same age as the students, and students who made me laugh and made me proud and made me feel like the things I said mattered to them. 

I started applying for new jobs months ago in hopes of getting back to the East Coast. As luck would have it, I still have no offers. 

I’m teaching two classes at Randolph-Macon Academy’s summer school right now, but it feels less like teaching and more like private tutoring. I have one student in English 11 and two in creative writing. Each class is three and a half hours each day and half a day on Saturday, which makes for a very long week. 

But sometimes on slow days, we walk downtown to the ice cream shop where Bill, the ice cream man, lets my students write essays requesting a new ice cream flavor and then invites us to come back so he can teach us how to make it. Sometimes I bring my mentor group to eat dinner at IHOP, even though it means I have to drive a school van. And sometimes I buy my students cupcakes and then walk 8 miles around DC carrying the giant box of them in the 100 degree weather and wanting only to stop and eat them all. (I resisted.) 

Being at a military school is a little like being in a foreign country that I didn’t prepare to visit. When my boss explained during our orientation meeting that students who broke the rules would be sent to the commandant and assigned tours I spent a while on Google learning what a commandant was and trying to figure out what exactly they’d be touring. I’ve learned the rules about never (ever) wearing “civilian clothes” or close-toed shoes, which means some stealth is required when I leave to go to the gym in the evenings. I’ve learned not to be alarmed when the Junior Marine campers start chanting things in deeper-than-natural voices during meals. 

I’ve been spending my weekends in DC feasting and visiting and exploring. One of my best friends just bought a condo there. It’s beautiful, with these wood floors and skylights and a balcony and a million windows.  

I don’t know how I got old enough to have friends who buy condos. I’m still trying to get used to being old enough to rent an apartment. Purchasing an actual home is a level of permanence that feels so far away from me right now. 

One of my coworkers asked me the other day if I had any kids. My first instinct was to laugh, and I had to remind myself fast that that was a perfectly reasonable question. That, in fact, that  stopped being a silly question many years ago, somewhere around the time that my friends started getting married and buying houses and being something very much like real adults. I can't decide if they've somehow become actual adults or if they're just very good at acting. 

During the spring, I was talking to my students about success and how the concept is completely relative. When I asked them what they thought personal success would look like for them in ten years, one of the girls said, “Well, I definitely want to be settled down by then.” 

“Define settled down,” I told her. 

“I mean, I definitely want to be married and have a kid or two by the time I’m 25 or 26.” 

“You’re looking at a complete failure right here, guys,” I told them. “You’re looking at the world’s worst role model! I can’t believe they let me teach you!” 

Another student who grew up in Europe said, “26!? You want to be married when you’re 26?! No one gets married before they’re 30!!” 

I hope I taught those kids a little more English than they knew before. But more than that, I hope I taught them that success can look like a lot of different things, and those things do not necessarily involve a spouse, a kid, or a house when they’re 26. 

One of my friends is getting married in a couple of weeks. Another friend’s having a baby at the end of the year. Some of my friends teach and some make art and some are still in school, and some make more money than I can comprehend and some make very little money at all, and some own nice houses and some live with their parents, and some are married and some are not, and some have kids and some know they never want them. And I don’t feel like any of those things have anything inherently to do with success or a lack of it. 

My friend in DC and I had a long conversation about how few people we know who don’t hate their jobs, how there are even fewer people we know who are genuinely excited about their jobs (regardless of how much or little they get paid). I don’t know why people consider success anything other than being excited about what you do everyday and figuring out how to make a living doing it. And that’s my motivational speech of the day. 

Now that the general public of Facebook has been alerted, I can 

finally announce the news that I’m going to be an aunt! My sister’s baby is due in January. I refer to it fondly as “the fetus” and she and I are perhaps equally excited about teaching it to read when it’s three, which is the approximate age at which I will stop being afraid to hold it. 

Spring

Spring is always full. Somehow it’s already the last quarter of the school year and time for short sleeves and not being able to breathe through my nose. I ordered my first iced coffee of the year a couple of weeks ago. It’s been over two years since I’ve been able to drink coffee at all. Maybe we lose things temporarily so we can be fully grateful for them later. (Like walking without a knee brace. And finally being able to workout in a gym again.)

A few weeks ago, I coerced a friend into coming to teach my classes poetry. I told him he would make me cooler by association and offered him fancy cheese. (It worked a little too well, as I think my students like him better than they like me. Justifiably so.) In the grocery store, he told me that friends from grad school only exist for him in New York, not in reality. But here we are, he said, walking around a regular grocery store, like regular people. 

I remember the weirdness of first trying to place people outside the context in which they existed for me. Friends from home visiting me at college, visiting college friends after graduation, meeting people now in the places they’ve scattered. For me there was always the worry that the relationship would be different if the setting changed. Sometimes they were different. But it’s easy to tell when a friendship exists because of proximity or convenience and when it’s made of stronger stuff. 

I started last week with a virus that caused me to miss work and lie on my floor with my muscles on fire, eating soup for every meal. I worried I’d have to delay my spring break trip, but my last night with fever was the night before I left. Again with the thankfulness. I drove to Knoxville to catch a bus to DC then a train to New York. Everyone thought I was crazy for taking a bus, but really, the lack of security lines, anxiety, million dollar parking, claustrophobia, and pressurized air made it worth it. I had a skylight, a second floor view, gas station snacks, and two seats to myself, and what more can you ask for? And if given the option, I don’t know why anyone would ever travel any other way but by train. 

On my first night in New York, eleven of us feasted in my old apartment (still my roommate’s apartment), and it felt like the last twelve months hadn’t changed anything. I wondered for a minute if I should have stayed in New York. If I should have spent another year trying to turn my manuscript into something I know what to do with instead of a pile of intimidating pages on my bookshelf. I could have tried to teach at Columbia and tutored to pay rent. I could have had dinner parties and joined a friend’s writing workshop and gone to readings every week and splurged on Levain cookies and weekend bus rides to DC and Boston and Providence. I could have walked with all of my friends at graduation. 

But I don’t regret graduating earlier, and I’m grateful for that, too. Because as much as I miss all of them, I knew it would feel like I was treading water I stayed, and instead I get to be part of that tiny fraction of people who wakes up every day and goes to work excited to be there. 

I filled Easter and the next few days in New York with coffee visits, dinner visits, and the food I’ve craved for ten months (Silver Moon gluten free blueberry muffin, I dream of you still), and then I told my old apartment goodbye. Sophie will move out at the end of May, and that was the last time we’d all be there together before everyone scatters again. My number of cities to visit will grow. 

I took the bus back to DC and spent a couple of days exploring and visiting older friends who’ve know me since I was a silent, nervous 18-year-old who had a hard time speaking to strangers, had barely been outside of Mississippi, and had never tried hummus (Or Greek yogurt. Or bagels.). We’ve come a long way, guys. (Why did you talk to me back then?) I biked around the Tidal Basin and National Mall on a bike a foot too tall for me, saw the cherry blossoms, visited Bei Bei the baby panda at the zoo, and walked a million miles. I used a friend’s guest pass to workout in a gym that supplied me with a chilled eucalyptus-scented towel (which alone probably costs more than a month’s membership at my regular gym). I feasted with people who still feel like a second family. 

My students think I have only have two friends, because they’ve seen one and heard another’s name. When I told them I had this suspicion, one of them said, “No, Ms. Smith, we saw a picture of you with three people. So you must have three friends.” I fear they think I imagined the others. I’m glad I didn’t imagine the others. (Students, if any of you are creeping on here, I didn’t imagine the others.) I’m thankful for friends who travel to sit in my living room floor telling stories and eating pretzels until way past bedtime. And for former roommates who still feel like roommates even when we live in different time zones. And for friends who teach me how to bench press without even making fun of me (audibly).

Ten days and 34 hours on the road later, I made it back home. I thought about grading papers, but I ate a dark chocolate bunny instead, because I know about priorities. 

Endnote

It’s time for my annual New Year’s reflection post again somehow. This is the first that's not bookended by piles of snow taller than I am. 

2015 was crammed too full. I got my wisdom teeth removed almost exactly a year ago, and I still haven’t fully recovered from it. I finished a draft of my book. I graduated from grad school. I organized a reading for my friends. I had two jobs that I loved. I moved home at the beggining of the summer, and then moved again at the end of it. I missed New York more than I ever thought I would. I spent the summer with two stress fractures and a hole in the cartilage of my knee, and I still felt better than I did the previous year. I biked half the perimeter of Manhattan, listened to blue grass  in Brooklyn at 3:00am, and ate BBQ on rooftops in Harlem. I spent 8 months applying and getting rejected from more jobs than I care to count. I did so many interviews that they blur together. I finally got one. I moved to Tennessee for my first full-time teaching job. I moved into my first apartment of my own. I pulled off my first semester and convinced everyone that I knew what I was doing. I spent more time with 48 15-year-olds than I did with anyone else. I flew on 7 planes (my 86th - 92nd), rode on 10 buses, spent 44 nights in hotels and other people's houses in 11 states, and drove 6,500 miles. I saw my friends get published and act in plays and make movies. I hosted some dinner parties. I got paid to publish something for the first time. I saw Boston with snow drift-mountains, Providence in a blizzard, DC during the cherry blossom festival, and the Smoky Mountains with fall colors. I visited old friends, said goodbye to a lot of people, and met even more new ones. I only read 46 books and felt sad about it. I wrote less than I wanted to. I started paying student loans. I put the deposit on my future dog. I turned 26. For the last essay of my semester exam, I asked my students to write about the most important thing they learned this semester, inside or outside the classroom. 16 of the 48 wrote that they’ve become better writers, and 8 wrote that I taught them the importance of kindness. And though I suspect that 80% of them wrote those because they thought I’d give them a better grade, it still made me feel like I’d done something right. 

I’ve started off 2016 with my first sip of coffee in like two years (I survived it), as much reading-for-fun as I could cram in, new socks, dark chocolate, and some diligent Shakespeare research. I get my new dog at the end of the month. I have so many things to be grateful for.