THE INVISIBLE STRING FULL

When I look in the mirror, I ask myself to be accountable to that 3×5 card, to consider and hold with reverence the connections tying me to so many people. We can focus on the divides or we can turn toward love, toward each other with our best selves, toward the way we need this world to be. We need others to help us move, to help us remember that despite the weight of loss and uncertainty that seems to loom larger every day, there is an invisible string connecting us all. This might be a Zoom date with another writer where we simply discuss our potential work or it might be a masked walk with an old friend-right now, we have to actively seek out the connections.

I believe that one essential role of being a writer is to grow our vision, to adjust our perspectives. One that sustains us–and we, in return, bolster the community when we acknowledge all the invisible and visible ways we are supported.

THE INVISIBLE STRING FULL

And what I want her to know is this: There is another narrative we must connect to, one where we focus on vibrant living, which means full engagement with one another.Īs a writer and a teacher of writing, one of my tasks is to help dismantle the myth of the solitary author. She’s studying our country’s brutal history, trying to make sense of the systemic ways we have created the inequity of our current world. Watching my teen absorb another bitter pill in the week of the Kenosha shooting, it’s like ice in the gut. His death, and his quiet fight with cancer, hum through the web, and we all feel it. I gather her in my arms, thinking about the invisible string connecting so many people to this man. Today was going to be a big push, but Chadwick Boseman’s death weighs on her-as it does on so many.

She has work due before school starts for AP History. It’s one in the afternoon on a pandemic Saturday, where days run together like raindrops quickly turning into a flood. Just now, my beautiful, bi-racial daughter emerges from her room. Our daughter has spent Shabbat dinners with them, and last weekend, we all went on a masked hike together, the two girls now eleven years connected. This woman and her family have become beloved. It was a rare, vivid moment of intuition, a visceral sense that we were already connected in this new place.ĭuring our daughter’s first week of kindergarten, I talked to another mother: it turned out her in-laws lived in the town we’d come from. When we drove into Austin that first night, pummeled by the heat, I said to him, “There are people here we know.” I had a feeling that we were already joined somehow to individuals with full lives in this city. The message taped to the bathroom mirror is one we had tucked into her small suitcase. We wrote her notes she could carry with her. We were immensely grateful, but we were also sad to be without our beloved daughter for the longest time ever. This isn’t a small distance to cover with a tiny person, so my husband and I asked his parents to help. When my daughter, Hope, was five, we moved from Northern California to Austin, Texas because I had a new job as Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the community college. In our bathroom, there’s a worn 3×5 notecard taped to the mirror that reads, “There’s an invisible string connecting me to you.”

The invisible string