The Thread 2020

My great grandpa cut off both his thumbs using a bandsaw in a woodworking accident,

When he got his teeth pulled he refused the anesthesia,

I never met Elof, I’ll never know the sound of his voice, what kind of man he was,

But some days all I wonder is how he would cope with heartbreak,

From what I’ve heard in my Mom’s tales of his life, I don’t think his heart could break-maybe tear or bruise, but never snap or shatter, and if it did, I doubt he would feel it,

There would be no burning deep in the pit of his chest, no sound, no tears,

I think he would hear a faint sort-of bursting noise, like a popcorn kernel between his lungs or a distant whisper of cracking knuckles,

Then he would look down, shrug, and walk it off like that part of himself had never mattered,

Or maybe that’s just what he wanted the rest of my family to think,

I will never be a woodworker or someone who won’t cry at the faintest sight of a syringe,

Most days I could never refuse something to numb it all,

I’ll always have my thumbs, my teeth, my heart,

But someday I might not have you and that is just the same to me,

My family lives into their nineties-for people like you it’s rare they make it to their sixties,

You say I can ask you whatever questions I want,

So I say, “How does a compression vest work? What’s a ‘sweat test?’ How badly does the flu poison your lungs?”

When really all I wanted to ask was, “What’s your life expectancy?”

How many more decades do you have?

When I first met you, I wanted to be a writer,

I spent my days and nights sewing sentences, embroidering alliterations and synthesizing similes until my hands fell asleep and dreamed of the world I had just made,

And I still type and want to wake up the whole world as it rests under me with the sound of my keyboard clicks, but I think I want to be a doctor,

Suddenly my nights became half poetry scribbles and swarms of buzzing ideas and half researching Cystic Fibrosis, Claire Wineland, nursing internships-anything I could get my hands on,

The whole world still has its eyes shut-I have to wake it up,

I have to find a way to open you up too,

I blink and in that moment the sun rises, the moon dives back into the horizon and clouds float up and drift over us,

You’re next to me, your hands and feet making homes for themselves in the warm sand,

The old familiar sound of waves dancing at the shoreline and seagulls soaring like elegant kites fills my mind, but you take up more space in my thoughts regardless,

“This stuff saves his life, you know?” Your Mom says in her clear-cut Long Island accent,

She twirls the pill bottle in her hand and reminds you to take your enzymes while you tell her to be quiet,

On this same day I remember a knot bubbling up from the pit of my stomach when your father was telling you to, “be a man” as if you’re never expected to be anything less than perfect,

It seems like most days your Dad’s this big-teddy-bear,

So I know some days you don’t have to be older-I just never know what goes on behind closed doors,

I just hope most days you are his only son and not expected to be anything else,

And then we’re back to now, with you asking me to ask you questions after my mind found a way to replay everything that’s happened in the past year into a few short seconds,

You still have that big white-toothed smile you inherited from your parents,

No wisdom teeth, nothing missing, perfect bite-and you never had braces,

In this moment, we are the only people in this universe, so I ask about your hometown,

What did the grass smell like in Bayville? What kind of birds could you hear chirping in the early hours of daylight?

Tell me about your childhood friends, favorite elementary schools teachers, all the memories you thought were too average to ever speak of,

And I promise when you feel big, which is most days now, I’ll grow with you,

But when you feel small, so damn small,

I will shrink the Earth in the palms of my hands,

The oceans will turn to puddles-we will put on our rainboots and dance in them like children,

Every boulder will be a pebble and the tallest trees will be no larger than toothpicks,

And your illness will be a tiny thing I can keep in my back pocket,

We will make stepping stones out of Jupiter and Mars and all the stars will shake when we walk by,

Won’t that be beautiful?

To look down at that world that confined us to gravity and medication and be free cosmos-dwelling birds way out there in that perfect nothingness,

And I know we’ll never fly that high and I’m silly for thinking so,

But can we try anyway?

Let’s take a road trip, pile our money together and buy an RV,

Maybe all the time spent traveling, taking pictures and holding your hand for as long as possible will be enough,

And maybe someday it will all add up to a few decades more.

my parents yell at me for spilling acrylic paint on the new carpet in my room

i come home and my mom’s using a toothbrush to scrub it out and i feel sad

I say, it needed a little color.

my drains and sink pipes are clogged with art and washed down ideas

and my dad hates me for it because they need to be cleaned with bleach

but i say, they needed some life.

i close the dishwasher with my feet, open the drawers with my elbows,

and turn the lights off with my nose, and they say i’m just being an idiot

i say, i’m having some fun.

i tie my shoelaces up by putting my feet up on tables and they

raise their voices, because you’ll scratch it, you’ll ruin it

i say, i’ll show love to it.

i stain my new shirts with sweet sodas and watercolors and

they tell me now you’ve ruined it, now you need to wash it

and i say no, i’ve added some life to it.

when i’m older and i have my own house, i’m not going to

worry about fingerprints on the refrigerator or muddy paws

leading to the kitchen, fruit juice stains on the pillows

or pen and marker on the dining room table

this is what makes it a home instead of a house.

If everything they told me growing up is true, you already know everything I want to tell you. I’m not the center of your universe, but you’re supposed to be the center of mine.

When I was five years old and I went to Sunday school for the first time, they told me “God created the universe in six days, and on the seventh day he rested. That’s why we rest on Shabbat.”

I was born on a Saturday, so I guess it was my mother who brought me into the world, not you. She didn’t have the choice of whether or not she could rest that day. I used to think you were a selfish bastard for taking every Saturday off when so many people needed you.

I was sixteen years old on that Shabbat when Leah and I crept out of her side doorway while her mother busied herself with clearing the table. We stood under the awning, where brittle gray vines slithered up the side of the house. Leah shivered as the slush beneath our feet dampened her boots.

She produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from inside her coat. She handed me a cigarette and tented her hand around it, holding the flame to it and staring intently as she waited for it to catch fire. I exhaled a silent apology to you with the first cloud of smoke that blackened its path in the crisp air. I hoped you would forgive me for compromising my lungs, one of the few attributes you hadn’t already screwed up for me.

The lighter flame glowed in the gray surface of Leah’s eye, glassy from the sudden sting of the cold. She stared blankly into the barren trees while she took a long drag from her cigarette, tilting her head back to blow a geyser of smoke upward, her lips parted as if she was blowing a kiss to the bleached-white sky.

“Aliya, I need to talk to you. I need somebody right now. I don’t know who it could be but you.” She turned towards me, and I realized her eyes hadn’t been damp from the sharp cold of the air.

“What’s going on?” I frowned and brought the cigarette to my lips, blowing smoke to the clouds.

“I don’t know how to say it.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She buried her face in her hand for a moment to take a deep breath.

“It’s okay,” I told her. I placed a hand on her shoulder and felt nothing but the layers of down stuffed into her coat. I made an effort to meet her eyes, though she couldn’t look at me.

Silence settled into the air for a minute. Our cigarettes were left untouched between our fingers, wisps of smoke dying in the cold.

“I’m gay.”

The words tumbled out without her control, as they did every time I said “amen” in synagogue, every time I said your name in vain after years of being told it was a sin. They did somersaults in the air and rang in my ears long after she said them. I wonder if you heard them as loudly as I did.

“But what about God? What about everything we spent our whole childhood learning?” I spat out questions, my eyes stinging. I wish I had known then that I couldn’t speak for you. I couldn’t dictate our entire lives based on the few words you gave us.

Tears poured down her face in buckets, and her cheeks had turned red. The cigarette was a long-dead ghost in her hand.

“I thought if anyone could understand, it would be you,” she said, her eyes pleading, though she had already resigned herself to failure. She dropped her cigarette and I ached as it fell, my cheeks hot, the distress in her face blurred. She kicked watery snow over it and walked inside.

I didn’t understand why I couldn’t read the Torah at my Bat Mitzvah. You said that my hips and my breasts made me unholy. The men wore yarmulkes to shield their heads from your light, and my hair tumbled freely down my shoulders. They wore tallis during prayer to cover themselves before you. My mom told me to wear a shawl to cover the inches of exposed skin on my back. She threw one over her shoulders to hide the ink she had etched into her skin in the years she distanced herself from you. You weren’t watching us in our home, but when we stepped into the synagogue we were subject to your scrutiny—every little bit of judgment you set forth in that holy text.

I stood at the bimah to give a speech, mimicking the men in their tallis with my shawl wrapped around my arms, shielding my back from you. I focused on Leah as I made my best attempt at projecting my voice. She gazed back at me and smiled, her eyes sparkling in the sunlight pouring through stained glass windows. Before she said the words that neither of us could face, she was my everything. I always thought you were smiling down on us.

The rabbi spoke after me. His thickly accented voice lilted through the synagogue, curling up at the edges of his words. He scanned the room with admiration and spoke to each and every soul in the room as a brother or sister. You were the father whose every will we still bent to, even as adults.

“To everyone in this room today, standing before Hashem, we are all family,” the rabbi said. “As we grow old and our children become adults in the blink of an eye, we will always be there for one another. Through loss and triumph, we are all united under God. We must all love each other unconditionally and treat one another as our brothers and sisters, our children and grandchildren, until the day we die. I would like to thank all of you for coming today and taking the time to worship and to celebrate this joyous day. Our dearest Aliya is a woman today. May she be forever blessed by the light of God and surrounded by the love of our beautiful Jewish community for the rest of her life.”

I beamed out at the congregation, women on one side and men on the other, filled with faces I had spent my childhood looking up to—the grandmothers that pinched my cheeks and the children who scuttled around my feet and grabbed at the hem of my dress. They watched me become a woman, despite the fact that I both looked and felt like a girl. I let my eyes settle on each and every one of them, hearing their silent vows to continue watching as I grew up, to see me married to a nice Jewish man, to squeal in delight at my newborns’ chubby faces, to pinch their cheeks every Shabbat, never stopping until their Bar Mitzvahs, to wipe away my tears as my children walked down the aisle, to hold my hand as my hair thinned and my skin wore paper-thin, and to see me lowered into the Earth had they outlived me.

I told myself I would do the same for them, though I knew I would always be most devout for Leah. I would follow her through every step of our lives. I knew you brought us together and could never see us split apart. Though, when we finally drifted, I blamed you rather than myself, for it was you who asked me to leave her behind thousands of years ago when you told us who was worthy of your blessing.