roller skating backwards

Going backwards. Going backwards on roller skates, the old type, the vintage ones and the swinging of the hips back and forth and maybe a bubble gum bubble in the mouth. Not one of the wimpy ones but a serious one, one that took the bubalcious 4 big squares to produce. Maybe watermelon, cotton candy, or just the regular bubble gum flavor. Going around a rink or out on the street. It just looks really fucking cool but I can’t do it. I can barely skate straight. Straight. Let alone going backwards.

Going backwards is something I do in my life. Going backwards into the same old habits or the same old people or the same old job. Same but different of course. But there is comfort to going backwards to the familiar of the past that isn’t like the risk of skating or walking backwards. So today I went backwards, I was going backwards to my old school, my first college, my undergraduate, for a graduate school interview. Going back, back but still moving forward is key. A peculiar familiar movement of going back and forward at the same time. The familiarity of the halls, the look into the classroom, the classroom where I took public speaking when I was just 19. 19. I am now 32. Applying for graduate school, again. School has always been my home base, my foundation, my return to freedom. Going backwards back into schools where I started my career. Going back where I felt most comfortable in the first place. Working with kids directly, not from the far distance of an office spewing rhetoric but looking into their real faces, their vibrant eyes and hearing their words and feeling their emotions not as statistics or policy decisions, but real students. I thought the policy world would gift me the ability to create real change, but in the office, in the meetings, in the conference upon conference I attended on how to fix public urban schools, but it didn’t, it didn’t, it didn’t. After a few of these conferences, I realized if all these highly intelligent, highly capable people all got up and walked to the closest, their closest public schools what a real difference it would make. The talking grew old, tired. A room full of talk so empty. So empty.

So going backwards to where I started in the classroom, in schools, now in counseling. Counseling. Going backwards to the school where I started. It was more about figuring out how to stand on my own feet then. Then it was. It was more about getting through. Through quickly. Probably too quickly. Now it’s more about knowing, knowing that there isn’t one way to get where you are going.