They gave me a certificate today. Paper. Official. My name typed neatly above the number twenty-five, as if the years were something they had kept safe for me, folded in a drawer somewhere, waiting to be handed back.
And a pin. Small enough to sit in a palm. A tiny gold thing, the size of a punctuation mark at the end of a very long sentence.
I held them both and smiled the way I have always smiled in those rooms — carefully, genuinely, with the grief tucked just behind the gratitude where no one needed to see it.
Thank you, I said. And I meant it. I meant every syllable of it.
Because the students were real. Every single one of them was real. The one who came in certain the world was the shape she had already been told it was — I watched her unbutton the certainty, slowly, like a coat she had been wearing too long.
The one who sat in the back row, saying nothing for half a semester, until the day he said something so precisely true that the whole room went quiet in the best possible way.
I was there for that. Twenty-five years of that. No certificate can hold what it was worth.
But here is the other truth, the one that also belongs in the room:
I drove to a building that was never quite sure it wanted to keep me. I parked beyond my official territory. I signed my name on a line that expired just before anything could be called permanent —
every year. Twenty-five times.
I could not plan a garden. I could not lean into the future the way people lean when they know the ground is theirs. I planned the way a guest plans. Carefully. Lightly. Always aware of where the door was.
And they needed me. Not abstractly. Specifically. My courses. My students. My willingness to sit on the committees, fill the gaps, and do the invisible work that held the structure up while they kept searching for the person they actually wanted in the position I was already doing.
They appreciated me. They meant it. They said so every year.
Appreciation and belonging are not the same thing.
I know that now. I have known it for a long time.
So today I hold the paper and the pin no bigger than a comma, and I hold both things at once — the genuine love of this work, the genuine grief of never being let all the way in.
Twenty-five years. Twenty-five contracts. Twenty-five times, I signed my name and made the expiry date mean something other than what it was.
A sheet of paper. A pin you could lose in the carpet.
This is what permanence looks like for a woman who was never offered it.
I do not regret the signing. The work was the work I wanted. The students were always a reason enough.
But I want the record to reflect this: I was never the placeholder they needed me to be. I was never pending. Never provisional.
I was in the classroom. I was the one the question landed differently on. I was the room that made it safe enough for someone to finally say the true thing out loud.
They cannot give me that on paper. They cannot fit it on a pin.
It was already mine. It was always mine.
Aquí estoy. Con veinticinco años. Con grietas, con gracia, con amor. Here I am. With twenty-five years. With cracks, with grace, with love.
