Today is election day, and while I didn't vote, I would like to think of my inability to do much of anything but cry publicly as a form of political protest. The city is falling apart and so am I. I cried while I waited for busses that never came, I cried while I rode one of the four which all arrived simultaneously, and I cried as I arrived late to the school I was scheduled to sub at today, resolving my face momentarily before entering the office so as not to appear entirely hysterical and be sent home unpaid. My weeping has become political because I simply cannot afford to do it privately; even when my world has collapsed, I must work. I must work mostly to house my weeping when I am not working, since the cost of living is so insane that I am rarely able to do much else. This is a political sort of personal crisis.
The office clerk tells me to help out in the pre-kindergarten next door since all the actual vacancies have been covered by people who arrived on time. (Actually, she doesn't say why; I am including that because I always feel guilty when I arrive late, even though I often do. I have figured out if I arrive a little late, I often evade responsibility for a single classroom all day and miss the pledge of allegiance.)
The children in room 101 are so small in their tiny chairs, and I join them in one, as they play at various speeds with pieces of apple and piles of mini-pancakes from plastic bags, stab at food intermittently with the wrong end of the plastic forks, mostly ignoring their milk despite all of the teacher's prompting to drink it. One boy says his tummy hurts and she tells him to drink his milk. I wonder if he has a lactose allergy. From the moment I sit down, the crying commences about basically everything they say and do. I never cry more than ten tears in a burst, but stopping entirely is impossible.
We go to sit on the rug and a little girl named Camille takes a liking to me. She has bouncy hair and colorful shoes. She shows me her drawing and says she made a heart, but it has this shape protruding from the left side, some odd tail or wing coming out from it, like it could crawl, or fly, and I cry softly while she is looking down at her creation. I pull myself together, and I tell her it is a nice heart. Then she asks me what letter 'love' starts with, and I cry again. I say it starts with an 'l.' She wants me to show her how to make it. I cry a little harder now, but manage not to be called out. I tell her to hold the pencil while I hold her hand like it is my pencil. I make the single line beginning 'love' with both of our hands, and cry softly as we move together.
Next they are singing the simple and tuneless songs created for children's education and despite being a singer, I am mute. I have yet to determine if I hate these songs because they are sonically horrendous or if it relates to my own upsetting childhood and very early loss of innocence, but I wouldn't usually sing them anyway, and I definitely can't even sing songs I love today. Camille stops singing to ask why I am not. I make a single line over my lips with the same pointer finger I pressed into hers to make the 'l.' I wipe the tears from my eyes with my drapey cardigan as discreetly as I can, but Camille wants to know why I have a tear on my nose. I make the 'l' on my lips again. 'L.' Lips.
Now we are having "circle time." Ms. Miller is going over phonetic sounds with them. She puts out her right fist for the initial sound and her left fist for the second one. Then she brings the fists together and pronounces them as a complete word. One fist, KUH.Two fist, ISS. Together now, KISS, and I cry. Then we do the process backwards, fists together on the whole word, then pulling them apart for the individual sounds. Fists together, WED. One pulled away, WUH. Two pulled away, ED, and I cry.
For a while, I am able to lose myself in a "family dinner" with them during playtime, but this, too, periodically makes me cry. I tell them to wear gloves when handling the hot pans so as not to be burned, and hand them the cooking mitts. Francisco has laid himself on the little plastic ironing board and is ironing himself to it as we set the table for some much needed comic relief. Karina wants to wear a tropical shirt while she eats and Camille wants to wear a pretty blue dress, so I hold each garment up for their little arms to move into. They serve me a plastic slice of pizza, a potato, and a round of brie. I thank them for inviting me and offer to help clean. Camille sweeps and I follow her with the mop, and perhaps they are learning a deeper lesson about working even when you feel like completely giving out as they observe me, but at minimum they are learning how to be cordial house guests.
I move to the table of blocks in search of something I can focus on without triggering the flood tide. Something simple with a clear educational use. COLORS. PATTERNS. STRUCTURES. I build a neat geometric shape with clearly defined color patterns, all green and red and purple. Camille wants to add blue and yellow blocks to it, but I tell her I only want green and red and purple ones. She tries to put a yellow block on top, and I ask her to take it back and give me only green, red, and purple ones. I tell her yellow is too happy for today, and she says that it isn't, but she complies with my wishes and shows me she knows which blocks are green, red, and purple, putting each block on another of its same hue.
Josiah sits on the other side of me and I hand him a random assortment of blocks. He wants to see how high we can build a tower. We make predictions as he adds blocks as to how much more it can take before it collapses, and I show him how to support it with both hands and adjust blocks to keep it standing when it starts to give in. It falls eventually anyway, and then he builds separate towers that continuously destroy each other and each time one makes the other fall, he says, "he died," and points at the pile of blocks, looking for my reaction each time, and I cry again, softly, and I ask why "he" had to die. He shrugs his shoulders and I cry more because there isn't a reason, something to make the endless cycle of creation and destruction meaningful.
Mrs. Healy notices me crying as we are cleaning up and asks if I am okay. I tell her I am fine, but I ask to go to the bathroom shortly thereafter. There is a lot of sobbing yet, and in the bathroom I can do it freely, and I continue to be amazed by how much crying is actually possible. I might never be able to emotionally handle having my own classroom again, and I might only fall in love with people at completely unfortunate and prohibitive times, but I am thinking by the end of 2014, I might set a world record for weeping, so that is something at least. I have wept enough this year to keep an overpopulated and thirsty world slightly less dehydrated, and perhaps that is a considerable gift. Infinite grief: drink up, world.
I am granted an hour and fifteen minutes for lunch and I need every minute of it to walk outside and listen to music. I decide to use my walk to get coffee since I am completely exhausted, and after walking a half hour to get the only coffee that will comfort me right now, my card doesn't work to pay for it, and I have no idea why, because it should. I don't have any other form of payment, and the man taking my order says it is fine, that it can be on the house this time. I tell him I can go to Walgreens and get cash. He tells me not to bother, that they will take care of me, and I wonder if he wants to give me free coffee because I have obviously been weeping for a considerable part of the past three days or if the universe has finally decided to cut me a break, if however small, and intervened through this barista specifically.
I sip it as I walk back to the school, and I am still crying in public, but I have grown into it over the course of the morning; I am crying less about the fact that I am crying to begin with. Tears fall, and I wipe them away. I believe in making the private public, and besides, today I have no choice. Though I didn't make it to the polls, I voted for quiet but unapologetic and relentless sustained sobbing, endless public grieving, and I find it appropriate because we probably shouldn't make any big political decisions before we've taken full emotional account of all we have and haven't done and everything we've lost.
COME AND SHED YR TEARS IN THE STREET, CHICAGO.
WE CAN'T GET TOGETHER UNTIL WE FALL APART.
