The Friday Before Finals

12/11/2020

In this self-contained world we’ve created, I ebb and flow like a gill, stretching open to the environment of my submersion. Morning opens as I drive to work each day, and sometimes I happen to glance up from grading or lesson-planning just in time to catch the day’s close through the narrow classroom window, too. I can tell it’s an especially vivid sunset if the white and gray walls of the school are splashed pink or orange, or sometimes, cool purple.

Last night I stepped out to the courtyard to watch the sky blaze and fall in just minutes, and I clambered up onto a table to see over the tall fences around the schoolyard. One semester into the school year and still, I rarely leave home except for school. Yet we are not isolated. This community winds together day by day to sustain this time of absurd uncertainty. Our grade-level lunch zones, our hallway arrows, our courtyard "6' apart" markers, have become the map for each day's moments of recreation: smiling teachers supervising groups of seventh-through-twelfth-grade students. We have adapted to a pulse, a cycle, bound by fences, marked by sunrises, measured in breaths and units and tests, rigid in its insistence that something—anything—feel normal. For a few short minutes I watched this fierce sunset flee, dipping behind the mountain, leaving gray wake. It was a longer breath, a deeper break, in the paces of evenings I have learned to make. My memory pulled me back to a time when my own high school teacher asked the class: "who here thinks sunsets are important?"

I would answer today as I did then, with a raised hand, but I had forgotten; I had lost that answer in the rhythmic patter of pandemic days. May I remember from now on. May the lactic sting of a hand raised and held so long remind me. May the questions, unanswered, hold my mind, and my eyes, open to the changing, revolving potentials in each day.