When a few weeks into the summer I told my ex-Virgo, who was taking a class and training for a new job from 11:30 in the morning to 9:00 at night, that he was lucky he was so busy because he didn't have time to be sad and that I had it way worse because I had nothing to do but think about us and cry, he told me that wasn't true, that I had no idea how he felt. Although I knew I'd oversimplified things in my accusation that he was too busy to be sad, and although I really did believe him when he said he was, I still felt sure my time off work made the breakup worse for me, a thought that was echoed by just about everyone I knew.
All July long, everybody told me that once I went back to work in August, things would start to improve. Once August rolled around, I heard it even more. When you go back to work in two weeks, you'll start to feel better. I just needed to be busy instead of sitting in the house in self-imposed isolation where I did nothing but think about my ex-Virgo all day long. My mother said it, my sister said it, my friends said it, my therapist said it. So many people said it, and they said it so much, I halfway believed them. At least I won't be sitting in the house looking at the spaces we occupied together, the ghostly imprint of the last three years impressed upon every last thing around me, I thought. At least I'll be forced to think about something else.
Surprise, surprise, I know, but that's not how it happened at all.
How it actually happened is I went back to work last Monday, and that first week back felt like the worst week of my entire life. I suppose objectively this can't be true because I've had a lot of bad weeks--like if we made some sort of bad-week scale and used some constant to measure bad weeks, surely others would have to have been worse--but on the current Kelly scale, the badness of last week tops them at all.
Instead of going to work and "forgetting" about my ex-Virgo, here's how things went down.
At the end of the day on my first day of work, I was called into my new AP's office (that's assistant principal for those of you not in the know) and told I was losing the AP class I've been teaching for the past thirteen years, the AP class that I'd been scheduled to teach up until at least mid-morning that day, because they "were going another way." At first she tried to blame it on my scores, which is ridiculous because my scores are above the global and state average--and if you want to talk about the aforementioned objective, objectively quite good--and when questioned directly if it was because my department head lost her two dual enrollment classes, she conceded that was part of it but maintained it was mainly due to my scores having gone down.
Now, losing my AP class to someone with thirty-five years' seniority who runs the English department is one thing, but sitting there in my AP's office post-pandemic when everybody's scores in every subject in every school across the country are down and being told my scores were the reason I was losing a class when my first year at this school when things were normal until right before my students' exam, my principal called me at home during the summer to tell me my students had the highest AP Language scores in the history of the school is another thing entirely. Of course my students' scores have gone down. The world's scores have gone down.
I wish I could say I handled it well, and who knows? Maybe if this had happened any other year and I weren't already an emotional basket case, I would have, but it's not another year, and I am an emotional basket case, and so I immediately burst into tears. While my AP, who's virtually a stranger to me, sat there looking extremely awkward and uncomfortable, I cried and cried, and every time I thought I was finished, I cried again, and when I say every time I thought I was finished, I don't mean just while I was sitting in her office, I mean the entire day.
I went up to my classroom on the way to my next meeting where I couldn't stop crying. I went to my department meeting where I cried some more. I got in my car where I cried off and on the whole way home. I got home where I cried while I told my son about losing my AP class. And the whole time I was crying, from about five seconds after my AP told me about losing my class? All I could think was how much worse this was because I didn't even have my ex-Virgo to go home to, to sit with me and listen to me, to make me feel okay, a constant thought ticking through my mind that made me cry even harder every time it arose (and in this parenthetical for the sake of not leaving anything out, I'll tell you that he and I talked for an hour and a half that night, and just like he always had the ability to when I was upset by anything other than him, he made me feel much, much better even after we hung up the phone).
The next day I felt a little bit better about the AP thing when I woke up (probably because I still felt better about my long talk with my ex-Virgo the night before), so that was good, but instead of going to school, I had to go to FIU for a dual enrollment meeting, and that was bad. Why? Well, over the past three years my ex-Virgo and I had gone to FIU together four or five, maybe six times plus that's where he went to school, so everywhere I looked while I was on campus, all I could think of was him. It also didn't help that I was however many miles closer to his new house and new job nor did it help when I went to Vegan Cuban Cuisine, a place we'd gone together when we were together, with some random teacher from school instead of with him.
Wednesday was more mopiness but no more than usual, but Thursday. Let me tell you about Thursday.
As I'm sure you've ascertained, I'm not a private person at all. I've always been a scream-from-the-rooftops sort of girl and have loved to show off the things that I love whether it be through stickers on my car, the clothes I wear, posters in my house, my tattoos. In my teacher life, that translates to photos. Since I started teaching twenty-three years ago, I've always had lots of photos up in my classroom. Griffin, Keifer, my ex-Glenn, our first dog Christopher, Hudson, Jazzy, old students I was particularly close to. My people (yes, that also means my pets) were everywhere.
Each year at the end of the school year when I have to clean my classroom, I put all the photos and their corresponding magnets in a small box, and at the start of the new school year, I buy more photo prints, sometimes adding and sometimes replacing, and the photos I replace, I place in a shoebox along with some other classroom paraphernalia I no longer use. That shoebox, let me tell you, is full of old pictures of my ex-Glenn and the kids. As you can imagine, over the course of twenty-three years, a picture person accumulates a lot of photos, especially a picture person who loves to show off the people she loves, so there are probably fifty, sixty, who knows? Maybe even more photos in that box. Some of them are even framed.
Well, this new school year, on Thursday, when I was setting up my room, I pulled out not the shoebox of old photos but the little box with the magnets and photos that came off my board in June, the photos that usually go right back up except for maybe one or two, and there they were: three photos of my ex-Virgo and me that I had taken down when boxing up my room in June. Two you haven't seen; one, you have. It's a photo of me and him and Hudson in a hotel that we took when we went to Tampa to see an orchestral presentation of the Final Fantasy VII Remake.
I took those photos out of the box, I stared at them, and of course, because I never do anything else these days, I cried. I then picked up my full-of-old-photos shoebox and took off the lid, and the first thing I saw was a framed photo of my ex-Glenn. Immediately, I closed the box. I put it back on the lower shelf of my standing desk. I put the photos of me and my ex-Virgo down on the edge of my desk. I left.
When I got home, I told Keifer about the photos (sans the part about the full-of-old-photos shoebox) of me and my ex-Virgo, and he could tell where the conversation was going before I said anything else.
Don't put them up. If you're not together, don't put them up. At least not all three. Then he told me he thought one was okay. I instantly felt relief.
We did say we're staying friends, I said. And the one of me and him and Hudson is like a friend photo, I said even though admittedly, it's absolutely not (although out of all three, it's definitely the most friendish one. Here. Judge for yourself).
The next day, the last day I had to set up my classroom, I showed up to work with new photos in hand, recent photos of me with Griffin and Keifer along with a photo of each of my (our) new dogs, feeling the absence of recent photos of me and my ex-Virgo in ways it seems impossible to feel something that isn't there. I then picked up the photo of me, my ex-Virgo, and Hudson, and I moved it to the pile of photos to be put up on the board. I started setting up not just my photos but everything else in my classroom, all the while ignoring the two remaining photos that sat on my desk, the photos that the previous day I couldn't stand to put in that full-of-old-photos shoebox. Finally, my classroom was done.
But, still, the photos sat on my desk.
I know it probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, putting some old photos in a box; after all, I have a ton of old photos of Griffin and Keifer in that full-of-old-photos shoebox, and putting them there has never been a big deal, but also in that box in addition to old photos of my ex-Glenn are photos of me and Clinton and my Clinton-related group of friends as well as some old students who in the past I was very close to but now no longer know at all. In short, yes, Griffin and Keifer are in that full-of-old-photos shoebox, but my relationship with them is different; excepting photos of them, every photo in that box represents a once-significant part of my life that has died.
And so, putting those photos of me and my ex-Virgo in that full-of-old-dead-photos-relationships box was is huge.
Mammoth.
Putting those photos of me and my ex-Virgo in that box isn't really putting photos of me and my ex-Virgo in a box; it's putting us in one.
And I can't do it.
Not yet.
In the end, I stuck them in a notebook in my desk drawer, out of my students' and my sight but also out of the box where my relationships have been put to rest.
And so,
as far as the notion that going back to work would make me feel better because my mind would be occupied by other things?
Can you hear me laughing where you are?
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