Endings, Beginnings, and Last Times.
Alan was sitting on my roommate’s couch in my nearly empty living room. The movers had already whisked away my personal belongings, down all four flights and into the rainy Tuesday morning to be brought to a storage place somewhere in the Bronx. All that was left in the room was Jessy’s couch and TV. My scraggly houseplants were already in foster care with my mom. My old Ikea dining chairs had been sold on Craigslist. Over the course of the summer so far, all of my possessions had been pulled out, evaluated, then either packed away, given away, or thrown away. The apartment was doing that hollow, echoey thing that apartments do when devoid of furniture. It didn’t really seem like my home any more without all my stuff in it… just kind of a big empty box with a glossy wooden floor, and a few faint traces of my three years there: The floor scuffed up by my bed frame, the marks on the wall in the place where I would park my bike.
I was washing dishes for the last time in that apartment. On a whim, Alan turned on Reading Rainbow and the episode happened to be about endings and beginnings, and about how one thing leads to another, and about ending up where you started. It got me thinking about how many times I had washed dishes looking out that 4th floor kitchen window, and how the view had changed.
In the beginning, the view was an ugly, squat brick building with a discarded sofa in back, deteriorating as weeks went by and the weather got worse. Then one day, all of a sudden, the entire building was demolished while Jessy and I were away at work and the view became a pile of rubble. Soon after, the construction started. To the tune of jackhammers and steam shovels, the site was excavated and turned into a giant pit. By moving day, they had started putting in the beams and foundation and pouring concrete and putting in the other things that rest underneath new buildings.
The new building’s origin and evolution sort of mirrored some things about my life:
At first, the old one was just there, because that’s where it always had been. Present, but unremarkable. And then, one day, someone decided that maybe they could put something better in there. And they probably thought about it for a while, and they probably had to get the proper permits and make a plan and talk to some architects and see if it could really work… and that's how it came to be that I was washing the dishes and looked out the window, and the building was gone! Just like that. I hadn’t known the time before that it was to be my last view of that unremarkable building.
(A lot of times, when it’s the last time you are doing something, you don’t realize it’s the last time until later. For example, I didn’t know last September that it would be my last year teaching Social Studies at PS89.)
Over time, like the owner of the building outside my kitchen window, I looked around at my life, which had been feeling unremarkable*, and said to myself, maybe there could be something different here?
And I thought about it for a while, and I talked if over with my people and started to formulate a plan… and one fateful day in December, I sent my resume to Nicole in Ecuador, to submit to the American School of Quito. That was my demolition day. I began to knock down the life I knew in favor of a new one I imagined.**
So, endings, beginnings, and last times... I washed the dishes for the last time as I prepared to do many things for the first time. l looked at the beginnings of a new building being constructed as I prepared to construct a new life in Ecuador for a couple of years.
All this seemed somehow related to the word carved above the entrance to my building…PROGRESS.
Progress. I always knew the apartment on Astoria Boulevard wasn’t a permanent home for me. It was pretty clearly a temporary resting place, with its weirdly pentagonal kitchen, and the backwards faucets, and the postage stamp of a bathroom and the slanted floors, and the unadjustable steam heat from the radiators that would suffocate from October to May, and the closet door that didn’t quite fit the frame. Even the neighboring storefronts, though they grew comforting in their familiarity, were unglamorous, and gave off an air of “good enough for now.” There was Lupe’s deli with its ripped awning, Jerry’s Beauty Cage, now closed, and the dress shop that rarely saw any customers walk through its doors (other than older, vaguely gangster-y seeming gentlemen.)
Despite all this, it was still a good apartment. It might not have looked like much, or been in a particularly trendy part of the neighborhood, but it was an important place in its own way. A place for me to perch, gather strength, save up, and figure out what I wanted to try for next. Eventually, it would be time to move on. Make progress.
Now here I am, following a dream. So far, following my dreams has felt like fairly mundane work. I am discovering that while actualizing dreams, you still have to listen to awful music in a loop while on hold, delete spam emails, get stuck in traffic, pay for overpriced airport sandwiches. You still have to wash dishes…But I guess that is what is meant by making a dream a reality. It’s not as if all of a sudden the clouds will turn to cotton candy and the whole world will burst into song. I’m still doing mundane things, but I’m doing them in pursuit of something I’ve wanted… Something new, an adventure, a challenge, a new perspective, a new framework for seeing the world around me. You don’t mind doing the work of life if you believe you’re doing it for something worthwhile.
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* Family, friends, and loved ones: YOU have always been remarkable. That is not the part of my life to which I am referring.
**Again, dearest friends and family and loved ones who are reading this, let me clarify that in no way do I mean to imply that I am demolishing my relationships with you and the lives we have been loving and living together. Those are permanent and immovable and always at my core no matter what. It was more my working life that needed renovation.
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