Zen

One comes to work at a juvenile detention facility and expects occasionally to be gutted. Sliced open, eviscerated, everything spaghetti-swirled, then told to put on a sunny face because the residents do not need to hear you are struggling. Your responsibility is an even demeanor and professional conduct. You must not succumb to the border of tears because the cruelty of this world overwhelms you.

I cannot get into specifics for confidentiality and base decency, but this is more about my reaction than their details anyway. (The details are ghastly. Please don't let that go misunderstood. In a regular school, this would be the scandal of the year. Here, it is Tuesday.)

I arrive at work and am told a resident assaulted one of my favorite students. In our morning meeting, every head turns to me. My attachment to the boy is well-known. I frown and say little at the time. When I see him, he is unusually sunny, explaining the circumstances (which others corroborate; I do not care how much I like a student in this system, I do not trust they will tell the truth). This was another moment of clarity in his life. Others on his unit are picking on him because he will leave in months and is inclined toward a future of which they will likely deprive themselves in favor of the unloving streets.

I do not react much to this beyond affirming that he is right to keep to himself, that he will blossom in college, and that I have confidence that he can succeed. However, when he tells me that he saw the sunset behind a mountain on his way to the hospital, I feel that fileting knife parting my belly. "I didn't know there were mountains around here like that. I've never seen mountains, and I thought they were all" -- he makes a zigzag in the air before me -- "and it was beautiful, seeing the sunset. It was peaceful." He gives a broad, genuine smile -- a rarity on him -- displaying his newly chipped teeth, and I want to hug him for this Zen depth. I do not. Hugging is not permitted.

I return to the education office and relay my interaction to my supervisor. I notice too late his haunted eyes. He tells me a story about a former resident that hollows me out. I had been having as good a day as one gets here. Hearing this tragedy, I stare at my computer screen for the final periods, the emotions so vast that none can present themselves.

I carry these horrors from the facility, something I pride myself on rarely doing. I shake a little charm bottle in my car every day after work to absorb my day here. Even if you think it does nothing, this little ritual has a psychological value. It is a demarcation between the facade of work and the purity of my real life.

At home, I pace and talk to my cats, who do not care for my ramblings. In my monologue, I cannot get out how I feel. If I could cry, that would purge some of it. Do I even want to weep? Is that appropriate for the occasion or just selfishness so I can feel something?

I do not concern myself with my residents' previous crimes or trauma history. Occasionally, I become aware of these, but their pasts do not bother me. Oh, you were a party toy for your father's friends? Sounds rough. Really, you murdered two other gang members on a whim? Weird. However, I ache from a sense of responsibility when anything happens to them after they become my student. I am not culpable for these things, but I get that terminal sense of "What if?"

Could I have prevented what happened? I don't see how. No part of me informed the assault or the other thing that happened. No sage advice from me would have had influence. Yet these happened under my tenure and cut me, as though their lives have been blissful to this point, as though these are first-time tragedies. As though these are not yet another and not the last.

last watched: The Imperfects
reading: The Secret History of the World