Flake

I cried today in my classroom after school.

No, don’t feel bad for me. It’s normal, and in total “Halie” fashion.

My students created Haikus and put them on snowflakes that they cut themselves. And the fact that these snowflakes made me cry makes me giggle in hindsight. However, I guess it also makes a lot of sense. Bear with me as I attempt to write for the first time in months.

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I have been feeling super nostalgic, and once I revived my MacBook that I’ve had since 2010, I began sifting through all of my pictures and videos. Some pictures make me incredibly happy, even if that feeling is hazed over with tears and a sense of longing that accompanies the realization that time never stops, never relents. “Was that REALLY five years ago,” I find myself asking in utter disbelief. These pictures simultaneously feel like yesterday and a completely different lifetime.

Back then, I would never be a teacher. I was going to be a doctor, or an ambassador, or moving all over the globe constantly, never keeping my feet rooted to any one place or person. But then I was going to marry that one person specifically. Oh, wait. Just kidding. Then I wasn’t going to get married. Then I was moving to Africa. And on and on and on.

Pictures are so interesting. I’ve always found them as necessary as oxygen, and I’ve always had this feeling as unapologetically as I, personally, can believe something.

A picture is worth a thousand words…except what is a thousand words compared to that moment you’re looking at that ended up being that last picture with him or her? What numerical value can you really put on something that captured that time in your life where you were convinced your life would look so different than it does right now?

Because I’ve been so nostalgic, I’ve realized how difficult it is to feel at ease and at peace with the here and now. I talk about this so, so much, and it’s something I’m constantly working on. I don’t know that I’ll ever get it right, but I’m trying and praying and hoping.

The nostalgia also has me thinking about my students. My kids. They are individuals who think and feel and have experiences my privileged mind can’t even wrap itself around. I’ve heard some of their stories: I’ve heard them talking in the hallways (not creepy, can’t help it sometimes when they speak loudly), I’ve been told face-to-face what they are up against, I’ve read it in their journals. And quite frankly, it makes me want to curl up into a ball and just cry.

I now think back to my nostalgia and feel really dumb. Here I am looking at my pictures and memories and feeling sorry for myself. LITERALLY. I look back to SENIOR BEACH WEEK or my various trips to New York, Italy or England and I catch myself feeling sad that I’m not in those places, doing those things again.

Of course, this is a normal emotion when you remember, right? Of course I should feel some sort of bittersweet emotion. Except, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe that’s a huge piece of the “peace puzzle” I’ve been trying so desperately to fix, to put together.

I wonder how my students feel when they look back on pictures from their childhoods. Some of those pictures feature parents and grandparents and friends who are literally dead. They can’t call them up and reminisce. They can’t hug them when they see them over Christmas break. They can’t make fake promises to “catch up soon.” They’re gone from this physical world. And I wonder how they feel when they see those pictures. Life certainly isn’t how they imagined it would be as they stood in the flash of the camera.

Do they feel sad? Are they sad for themselves? I imagine they feel an array of emptions not yet made aware to me. And then I get mad at myself again.

How lucky I am, after all, to be sitting here being sad and happy and nostalgic about the “good ol’ days” that were never as good or bad as I made them out to be at the time.

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So, back to these snowflakes I referenced earlier – you know…the ones with Haikus that made me cry? I did this activity, and I’m not sure I even knew WHY (sorry, Steph). The students probably realized I wanted them to be able to compose and identify a type of poem (Haiku) based on its structure, or whatever. What I never expected was how representative and meaningful it would be to me, standing in my classroom alone, at the end of a long and somewhat annoying day. I didn’t realize that I would look at each of those snowflakes hanging in the back of the room and see a barrage of faces flash in my mind. I see their ideas and their words, and I see how even the way their snowflakes turned out totally make sense.

That one student has a bigger-than-life personality, so his snowflake was literally an octopus. Literally. That student over there cannot even fathom the potential she holds, and her snowflake is tiny, tiny. Like, “can’t even see it from the front of the room” tiny. Her Haiku, of course, was the first one to be finished correctly in a class of nearly 30 because she always catches on so simply and effortlessly. There’s that one snowflake I can hardly read because the pencil he was using was nearly gone. That student, her snowflake seems emptier than the rest. Her words are small, and scraped together with a lot of effort. That student actually lost her father last year, so I guess that emptiness makes sense. Who am I to decide what her schoolwork should look like?

I strung the snowflakes across the back of the room as I cried. It was honestly such a mess. Ceiling dust in already irritated eyes is not a good combination. I hung the snowflakes just like I hung butterflies in a classroom in Tanzania a lifetime ago. The same classroom that ultimately placed me in the classroom where I cried today. Full circle, I guess.

Inez Flakes

Inez Flakes

Tanzanian Butterflies

I hope the kids look at those snowflakes and don’t remember an activity specifically cooked up to remember a term for a test. I hope they recognize those snowflakes for what they truly are: a beautiful reminder of how unique and imperfectly perfect they each are; words to be shared and thoughts to be heard, even if written with the dullest of pencils.