Slay
Within the chaos of the after-school exodus, I try to catch up to my two young sons, steering my bike onto the grass to cut around the crowds. As I pass, a middle school girl called out to me, “Hey, I like your purple hair!”
A beat after the compliment she’d bellowed, a tiny little kindergarten voice chirped, “It’s slay.”
I recognized the older girl from some scuttlebutt on the neighborhood Facebook page. Another parent had asked her to stop cursing in front of the little ones, wanting her to think about the example she was setting. That frustrated neighborhood parent was right about that girl and her influence, but not in the way she thought. A kindness was offered and then echoed—the young girl parroting the impulse of the older girl.
In these early days of the election before-and-after, there is a tendency in me to cleave apart from them, to sever as I try to get my bearings. To find ourselves in this same terrible place is both unfathomable and somehow unsurprising. I picture myself with a sharp machete cutting through metaphorical kudzu and vines, trying in vain to separate myself from the people who brought us here yet again.
But that girl, too young to vote but not too young to have lost rights alongside me, made a different choice. She let loose her honest tongue and sent out a flicker, a tendril of kindness to me, a grown-up she didn’t know, and damn if I didn’t need that little shimmer, even if it was just about my silly hair. A glowing thread unspooled from her to me.
That gossamer string, weaving between the clusters of students and parents, reminds me of mushrooms, of all things. Scientists posit that mushrooms can talk to each other in the dark soil of the underground. Messages shoot along the mushrooms’ mycelium, webbed threads that stretch into the earth and connect the mushrooms to each other in a complex community. And as those signals crackle along the threads, they are caught and understood by other mushrooms in a manner akin to human language.
And so, because of that girl, I wonder what it would be like to set down my imaginary blade into the rain-soaked November grass. Instead of looking at my neighbors with suspicion, wondering how they voted while watching them gather decaying leaves from their yards and shove them into tall brown paper bags, I could think of all of us, trudging along together on our way home. And maybe as we walk together, waiting for our turn at the gate, we allow ourselves to get tangled up in each other’s webs, linked with light and language, our mushroom mycelium reaching out to each other in a call and response. Maybe we humans could be at least a little bit like mushrooms, letting our electricity flow out and snap along the lines that connect us all.
