Time will heal...

Almost a year since I have publicly posted on this blog, so maybe it is time to reopen my thoughts on my life and the life that carries on around me. It has been a year to the week that I moved into my pad in Brooklyn! The above picture is my apartment bathed in the changing light of the season. It has been my cave that gives me some semblance of roots in a city that is covered in pavement, and that really doesn't allow for much leeway in planting new seeds of change. I have tried time and time again to do it, and made it a full year. Cheers to me.

Today I am a bit melancholy. A word in my vocab that I have a tendency to use a lot. I really do like the word, but I don't necessarily the feelings it invokes. I am lonely, I am tired, I am happy and I am sad at the same time. My new home for a year is a stones throw from a home that I didn't choose many years before. A home that welcomes me every night after a long day without judgment. A home that has been around for over a hundred years and has seen many struggles, hardships, and tears. A home that has heard the laughter of children, or the hum of a seamstress' sewing machines, or a scribble of a writer's pen. This is my place now. And yet I am still not grounded. It is my normalcy in a life that has been far from normal. It will nurture me and send me on my way when time comes. It has no true place in my heart, but it is a constant reminder that it will stand in silence until I am ready to let it in.

A stones throw. To a world that is now gilded by gentrification, and growth. A place that I lay in terrified unknowing, starving for food and for love. I was 18 sleeping in a school yard without the slightest clue if I was going to wake up in the morning. Or, if I wanted to. For many years I couldn't remember the names of the streets or the neighborhoods that I roamed. It wasn't until I was on a casual stroll one fine Sunday last fall, when I encountered that school and the memories came flooding back. I threw up. Gone were those broken bottles and graffiti filled walls. In its place was brightly colored murals drawn by students with wonder in their eyes. The basketball courts held booths of a neighborhood fair with clothes and fruits and various fun little nicknacks. I stared and stared, holding onto the chain link fence trying to steady my wobbly legs. I stared with furious indignation at its presence, so sturdy with time. I wondered if it remembered my tears, my fitful sleep, my hunger pains. I wondered if it could talk, would it have acknowledged me with surprise or with bewilderment or with a knowing smile. I stared with disbelief that I happened on this place without any goal to do so.

You can forget the past, but the past rarely forgets you.