It was mid-morning and though I had been awake for several hours, my body was still stretching out, my muscles still relaxing, coming down from the defensive position I sleep in.  

 

There’s a tension in my shoulders that I’m not sure will ever be fully released. Too many years hunched over laptops. Too many years protecting my neck.  

 

The first job that I knew it wasn’t safe to be out in was my first: a food court job at the mall with a chain-smoking short-shorts wearing Baptist of a boss who liked to make fag jokes on her breaks.  

 

Even now, there’s a rigidity I hold when I go to work, especially when I teach. Eight years of walking into classrooms and I’m still a little unsure of how my students receive me—the whole me. Because in every classroom there lies the potential for a bad evaluation, a disgruntled parent, an unsympathetic supervisor.  

 

And so here I am, fourteen years after my first job, sitting at my kitchen table, working, my first job out of the classroom in years. It’s Jamie’s day off, and she’s making an elaborate breakfast, country ham sizzling in the skillet as she plays her Morning Rave playlist.  

 

But then the mood shifts. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on, she kept telling me, her voice rising in pitch as my sense of panic began to roll in, hot. Did someone die? Did we need to go to the hospital? Did a friend need a bail out? She screamed and ran to wrap her arms around me, sobbing into my shoulder. What, what, what? I kept yelling, like a screeching parrot with a limited vocabulary. Why in the world was she clawing into my back, leaving the ham in the skillet to burn? 

 

We Won 

Won What?  

 

And it took a few more moments before she could sputter out, Supreme Court. And I cried too, my shoulders releasing down my back.