jessingrassellino

Category: creative writing

  • Ms. Jessica

    jess ingrassellino, October 2020

    I was the headmaster at my school for orphans. “No, no, NO! You have to

    stand right here. Princess wouldn’t go over there,” I’d command my younger sister, who played every supporting actor role with passion and vigor. We played this game where we pretended to be orphans every day after school. I was probably ten or eleven before we fully quit the game because we got too old for imaginary sanctuaries.

    It’s kind of funny to me now, to think back on what I thought teaching and helping were. Mostly, I thought it meant being in-control, and getting to have control. Both equally appealing to my child-mind. It was strange when I realized that teaching, the art, the act, had nothing to do with power or control.

    “Miss Jessica. Miss Jessica, will you help me with my card?” This little boy was a first-grader in the classroom where I volunteered after school a few days a week. In a rare moment of clarity, my mom had recommended that I volunteer in classrooms since I was interested in teaching, so I did. I met with the elementary school principal, and the next week, I was volunteering in a first-grade classroom – actually, my first-grade classroom, with my first-grade teacher, who was now in her forties.

    “Oh, that’s a beautiful card. Your mom will love it.”

    “This card isn’t for my mom,” he replied, “it’s for my Grandma. My mom’s dead.”

    As a sixteen year old, that was pretty much peak awkward. I tried my best to recover: “Well, I know your grandmother is just going to love that card.”  For weeks after,  I felt like a fool for assuming that he had a mother because he was making a card.

    Over and over again, my students have called me out — usually inadvertently — highlighting the gaps in my knowledge and limits in my experience. I’ve started to think that teachers are just people who like learning things the hard way. Within my first four months of teaching high school, I was certain I’d lose my job.

    “You know what lady, I don’t give a shit!” Eddie shouted.  Eddie, the 19-year-old senior. The genuinely nice kid who put on the tough-guy armor to make the world safer for himself.

    “Yeah, well, you know what?”

    I, all twenty-three years of me, yelled, “I don’t give a shit either. Now go to the principal’s office!”

    Yeah. I did it. I lost my entire temper in fifteen seconds. Couldn’t sleep for a week. Kept waiting for my whole career to get upended. You know what they don’t teach you when you study to become a teacher? They don’t teach you that all of the shit you’re struggling to leave behind is the shit that’s going to bite you every day until you deal with it. That illusion of control I had when I was five? It went out the door with Eddie.

  • Lingering

    jess ingrassellino, September 2020

    I don’t think of you,

    even when I smell coffee

    brewing before I’m awake,

    or when I see the chiffon red

    dress hanging in the closet – the one I wore

    when we lay, laughing, on the grass.

    Or when I order tacos from

    Taco King at 9:30 on a

    random Tuesday night.

    Every day, I see the doorway

    where you stood when I told you

    “I need to leave you”.

    But I don’t see your

    face, looking lost, crushed, hopeless;

    I don’t think about how you

    forced back the tears as you

    asked again to make sure that

    this is what I really wanted.

    For a moment, when I stumble on the

    wedding ring you left in the velvet box,

    with the note you wrote

    when you proposed, I stop. Turn the box

    over and over in my hands, then

    take it to my bedroom and lock it away.

  • Father

    jess ingrassellino, fall 2019

    My father isn’t religious

    but his parents are catholic, so

    he and my mother married

    before she graduated high school.

    My father isn’t a dreamer.

    He’s never burdened with the

    weight that comes from

    worrying about others or from

    imagining what’s possible.

    My father isn’t a judge, but

    beware, all you who enter his chambers.

    Reality is distorted, the

    victim is the whore, the

    anorexic is obese, and all that matters is

    what happens to him.

    My father isn’t brave, so he

    hides in his living room with

    curtains closed. He reads all the books,

    searches all the websites and

    watches all the videos, building

    walls out of his opinions.

  • Stories We Tell Ourselves

    jess ingrassellino, October 2020

    content warning: attempted suicide, depression, inpatient hospitalization

    … and there’s this idea that the stories

    we tell ourselves are the stories others

    believe…

    A woman calls her daughter, cigarette

    dangling between her yellowed fingers,

    turning to ash faster than she can smoke.

    She is my mother, and today, she’s called to

    tell me she wants to die. I’ve heard it all before,

    but against my better judgement, I listen.

    “Of course, you wouldn’t understand,” she says.

    “You wouldn’t know what this is like.”

    But, go back. Go back ten years, and I am in

    Zucker Hillside Hospital, Lowenstein 5, a woman

    trying again and again and again to die.

    I was so very angry then.

    I am waiting for a phone call, call that

    won’t come, from the black phones on the wall

    (they don’t dial out), my right foot a metronome

    keeping time with the pace of my thoughts.

    I’ve always been a good talker.

    Last year, I convinced them I was okay.

    Six months ago, more of the same. But

    this time isn’t the same. I’m trying to play my

    game, telling them I’m ready, that I want to live.

    They’ve heard it all before; this time,

    they won’t let me leave.

    There’s a record now, a blue vinyl binder

    on a cart with other binders, blue and green, each

    thick with the pain of past lives. My name is written on

    a piece of masking tape stuck crooked on the back of the

    binder; they pull mine from the shelf as the nurses aide

    closes the door of the meeting room that’s

    hiding behind all the locks.

    I sit around the breakfast table with

    five strangers become friends, trading my box of

    cheerios for another hard-boiled egg, my milk for

    an extra butter. These are the economics of an

    inpatient hospitalization unit. Last night, they brought a

    cake for my birthday and sang. This morning, I take the

    hard-boiled eggs and butter, mash them up, and enjoy a

    makeshift bacon-egg-and-cheese.

    We sit after breakfast, before group, fantasize about

    “getting out”; we don’t realize that inside this

    asylum, the only prison is our minds.

    So when my mother tells me I can’t possibly

    understand, the anger comes again

    (I was so angry then).

    My heart is pounding, faster. I swallow the

    urge to yell, breathing deep as I make the

    left turn onto Oceania street.

    “You wouldn’t know what I understand about

    being in a mental hospital; you’ve never asked.”

    She’s defensive now, her voice building walls,

    but I’m justified. I waited ten years to speak my

    peace like I waited on the cold dormitory bed,

    reading alone with one ear on the black

    phone at all times.

    Parents come to the unit, waiting awkwardly for

    the aide to buzz them through the locked door.

    My stomach is in knots: rage, sadness, jealousy.

    People without visitors, people like me, are

    required to remain in our rooms for two hours

    following dinner each night, left to feel we’re fragile,

    broken, just because we want to be loved.

    But today, my mother is crying, digging her heels in,

    defending her lack of concern. All the terrible things

    that happened to her happened to me, but

    only one of us can forgive. And like every other

    challenge to her carefully constructed narrative,

    my story is the chapter she’s deleted from her

    fiction. She’s replaced me with who she needs to be

    to survive herself.

    I hear her take a long drag on another cigarette, I

    know those knotted hands are trembling with

    anxiety and anger. She’s ugly when confronted; I’m

    ugly when she refuses to hear me. We dance around

    our truths, embracing the stories we tell ourselves

    about how we live.