The poor grass in the new place
Uploaded by jenonthelake on Apr 30, 2001
I am strangely idealistic early in the morning. I almost feel like singing sometimes. There is something about Times Square at 7:30 AM. You notice a lot. The desolateness. The workers in their blue jumpsuits, loading and unloading. And the calm in a place not usually known for calm. This is where I wake myself up most mornings with a walk from 42nd to 56th St when I opt to get off the train a little early. The few I run into with some regularity smile at me with an unspoken friendship.
I find pleasure in the view of skyscrapers reaching up to the blurry skies. So different from the reality that is the near-ghetto landscape of Bushwick, the place where I had been only an hour before. The place where I live. I can almost feel everyday on the L, the second I leave Bushwick, like I’m leaving to another world. That second brings back the memory of another world I left. The small island where I was born, the place I can barely even remember anymore. I think sometimes with a smile and sometimes with self-pity of those first months in an alien place.
I was six that year. My parents never explained anything to me. Mi mami dressed me up one day in a little flowery dress and it was really hot and we all went in a long taxi drive to this huge place with lots of people and we had all these bags and then everyone was crying and then we went in this thing and we were flying and I got scared and I was crying and we got here and that’s it. That was all I understood. And we had to start our lives in an incredibly alien place.
I was very unhappy. I hated the other girls at school before I could even understand them. I envied their smiles and their new shoes and their Mickey Mouse book bags. How I lived my days with envy. It was my companion on the way to school and on my lonely way back. That big, red brick, building loomed intimidating in the distance that first day as I neared the corner of Wilson Av. But it really never stopped looking that way. School was a blur of pointing fingers, impatient faces and bored, droning voices who mispronounced my name. I was always so silent, staring at...