A new place, a new start

March 13th, 2005
619 W. 136th Street Apt. 15, (Harlem) New York, NY

Again, a frustrating inability to access the internet when my laptop is seemingly picking up a network somewhere in this universe, somewhere here, somewhere near this fourth-floor walk-up apartment that I now share with a Hispanic family of ever elastic number – first a mother (Rosario), a father, an English-speaking friend, a teenage daughter, a sullen pre-teen grandson (Isaiah). The next day add one or two babies (“cousins”), a teenage/young adult male (Tito), another teenage girl (friend?). That same evening, add a legion of middle-aged women primping before a Saturday night adventure, the young girls mimicking in the room next to mine where they all sleep. I feel a little strange and alone, in my 10 x 10 x 12 room, on my big queen bed, all by myself, compared to the closeness of the uncountables next door, and I hold a quiet prayer in my heart that I will manage to remain aloof yet friendly enough to retain that persona of foreignness that gets me quizzical smiles and nothing more threatening in this neighbourhood as I live female, young, and without family.

We were, over my first couple days, the loudest apartment in the building, which I noted with a smile and enough sickness, still, to sleep through—-blasting hip hop/reggaeton music interspersed with hysteric laughing voices can be heard from downstairs all the way up the stained staircase of what is now my new home.