So This is Now.

I’m owning it.  I’m a writer.  I’m working on embracing that bull and just riding it.  I don’t think I’ll like what happens if I get thrown, so I better just own it.

But it doesn’t make me not other things.  I am former teacher- just recently – and the wound is fresh.  I just left a decade long teaching career to do a very silly thing.  Write full time?!?!  Who does that?!?!

“Happy September!”   I thought yesterday and remembered, with a pang, always trying to start a month that way and a week saying “Happy Monday” to my students.  I miss them.  I also miss the thrill and creativity of crafting lessons and conducting a class out of chaos.  I miss the routine, especially the same way the first day of school always goes but is a fresh experience for all of them.  I miss my colleagues but that’s never a reason to think of going back.  So many of the people I really loved and loved working with are gone.  Or they’ll be gone next year.  The staff turn over at my school was traumatic for me.  I was so immersed in my job that I had no other friends and I kept loosing them.

Well, I made a decision and I have to see it through- for a year, at least, because I’m unemployed now.  The reasons for leaving the school I worked at are many and the reasons to stay at home and focus on my writing are fewer and much more simpler.  I will be writing about it in depth.  For now I want to say what I always want to say:  I didn’t leave because of my students.  I’m heartbroken about leaving because of my students.

So now, things like this are happening, because I made room for them:

Excerpt from Dissonance.  An upcoming novel by me.

Green sat in her empty apartment, a beer in her hand and a computer in her lap. The studio apartment was hollow sounding and too quiet when she didn’t have the TV on but now was no time to escape. Now was time to face what was on the screen of her laptop, no sound, just horrific carnage on repeat. The blurry, grainy figure in all black wearing a hoodie and a backpack, was as still as a moment before the rage. He entered the platform, stood transfixed right by the edge of the tracks and decisively stepped off when the time was right. After the painful moment of pause, the explosion lifted the train although there was nowhere to lift it to, crunched it against the tile roof, and tore it apart.

It was this moment Green kept watching. Something wasn’t right, something about the smoke. She rewound it and watched it again. She rewound it and watched as the smoke, instead of seeping or billowing out, seemed more to enclose the train cars and then seep quickly back in, as if hunting the victims inside the train. It chilled her. She kept thinking about the tile, what she saw out of the corner of her eye. The smell of something burning when she sat alone in her apartment, her husband’s and son’s blood converging and congealing with that of the tweaker robber, now dead, too. The smell was from all the gunfire but she remembered thinking this was her life burning down.

 

I’m also a caretaker of my 98 year old grandmother.  Read about my “labor of love” at:

Transcribing Memory