A home is only a home if I paint the walls blue. This is about you, Walton Avenue, who I have
come to love like Warren Road, like Center Drive. Streets overflowing with what people have let
go of, my block a mismatch of aluminum siding and brownstones; this avenue
sounds like clamoring to cabs from bars, on the way home from Yankee
stadium. The echoed melodramas of
bar-goers were the music to my midnights, talking only as New Yorkers do, their
escapades on display for all of the Concourse to see. I turned my pillow over and tried to get back
to sleep.
I used to crave a home where I felt rested and relaxed, but
is still where the pulse pushes blood through the arteries of the city. This was the first home I’d had since a blue
room in Brooklyn, on Manhattan Avenue, where four of the best years of my
twenties were spent. My first order of
business here was to paint the walls
blue – blue is a forgetting, smells like starting over, and is the most
passionate and pertinent color of my life.
This time, one wall around the window seat was adorned with
hues of sea, and I meditated on this finally being a home, having just left the
crimson fire of anger and the uncertainty of a friend’s couch. Here I was starting from scratch, and truly putting
into practice the idea of prioritizing me.
Sometimes we who teach are also caretakers of many other souls when we
clock out of work. Sometimes we take the
world on our shoulders on Tuesday mornings, and have to give it back in the
evening.
I signed the lease as a single woman, happy to be alive,
reinforcing my faith in the universe. I
meditated on this for months, and when I met him I was a brick wall in the
pouring rain – intent on standing tall and alone, even if it means I got
soaked. He asked me to come in from the
rain, but I was dancing. He asked me to
dance with him, but I could only hear my own songs. He was persistent in his asking, telling his
friends with subtle swag that he could win me over. I was reluctant in the rain, but he walked
me home when it poured outside, so I relented to a dance.
We will always be a whirlwind of emotions, so we danced like
fire through the next year, and were soon posting photos of tanzanite rings
(because he knows I will not wear blood diamonds). Glen Washington was the soundtrack to him dancing
through our apartment, cooking chieh bou
yapp, and we got married in a language that I do not speak. Our life opened up like wildfire on dry grass,
soon it was autumn and I was packing our lives into cardboard boxes to bring
our love to a new state.
We had also managed to create an epic soul along the way back
to Michigan. Mulay Nasir is a hurricane
all his own, with untameable curls and dimples for days, he caused me to step
back and look around me like everywhere was home, as long as it contains his
laugh. Every window mine to look out of
onto the world, every door welcoming me back, every streetlight shining my walk
down Highland.
We have moved, again.
He complains as he carries a heavy parcel of books, in his thick accent
that I have “too much stuff”. I remind
him quietly that I am a teacher, it is a hazard of the job that I fill my life
with books and paper. I am still
unpacking my office, which reminds me of the selves I used to keep as my
favorite masks, and I still have to paint the walls blue. My new space is a trek through the universe
to a new galaxy, but with my boys, everywhere is home.
