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To the trans pizza delivery driver, I’m sorry
This house is a mess. It’s been frozen in time since Nov. 6.
I never got around to removing all of the Halloween decorations, so black trees and a Hallmark haunted house from the early 2000s still sit out, along with tissue-paper-wrapped glass skulls and a picture of my parents in a Dia de los Muertos frame. The ceramic and plastic jack-o-lanterns I put above my kitchen cabinets and turn around after Halloween so they appear as harvest pumpkins still smile at me with jagged teeth and triangular eyes. It feels appropriate.
This is not my typical grief reaction or trauma response.
I cried all day on November 6. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s not hyperbole. I couldn’t stop crying. It’s as if my body simply could no longer hold the pain I had been keeping inside since 2016.
And that year was ROUGH, not just because of the presidential election that year. That was just icing on the shit cake the year had been up to that point. 2016 was the year my mom died, and it was the year I had to make the heartbreaking decision to euthanize not one, but two beloved old dogs.
In the years that have followed, I’ve lost students to gang and domestic violence, endured the trauma that was COVID, and lost my dad. In this last year, we experienced an unpredictable and unprecedented…
