My street waited to be charming again. It was April and I could see it in the buds that formed at the ends of branches, in the park covered in grass and not snow. Change was so slow to arrive. Winter had us scratching at our pale arms and pulling on darkening hair. Going out and socializing just felt like something we had to do to avoid the complete disintegration of our mental health. It was formulaic and necessary, like taking antipsychotics. December and January. February and March. I slept through it all. I was waiting for a reason to love this place again.
I moved into my Brooklyn apartment last September on a hot and humid weekday, one that I had a hard time imagining now, having been so cold for so long. The notion of shorts and tan legs and ponytails seemed too distant and foreign, a season left for cities far away, somewhere in the southern regions of the world. Sydney, Cape Town, Rio. Not here. Not Greenpoint.
I longed for those days, for how summer married with fall, bathwater nights and un-air-conditioned bars. I left the windows of my apartment open for a month, warm air taking residence within the four walls that contained my new life, covering me in a layer of sweat that never left. I hated it then, though I would surely love it now.
Soon enough, I watched leaves litter the sidewalks in shades of muted salmon. And then, finally, winter descended.
Everything had been so ugly for so long. Without the green canopy of trees, all that remained were bare bones of the buildings and the unmitigated evidence of their inhabitants — the giant black mastiff who routinely stuck his parking-meter-sized head out of a broken window screen, bellowing at pedestrians three stories below. The old man and his ancient, rotting Chihuahua with bald patches and a tongue perpetually hanging from its mouth. The Polish woman who seemed to be the self-appointed manager of a brick building I passed every day, busying herself around the garbage bins while wearing canvas gloves and a handkerchief around her head. “You look like Little Red Riding Hood,” she said to me on one awful, freezing day – the only words she uttered to me after five months of passing her on the sidewalk.
There was the house that blended in with the sky, chameleon-like in its shade of blue. It was a cloud itself, one just nearly on the verge of disappearing. There was the townhouse with a crumbling bay window half-covered in curtains. During Christmas, the child who lived there strung lights across the ceiling and made the place look like a pirate ship. A paper snowflake was still taped to the window, holding onto the notion of a winter I couldn’t wait to leave.
The elderly and infirmed took residence here. The mentally disabled were led by the hand by patient relatives. Older women pushed strollers over broken pavement. In the basement of another building, in a room covered in cheap white tile, a window gave only a glimpse of a morbidly obese person with ankles the size of grapefruit and swollen feet stuck in a pair of sandals.
Young kids mixed with Brooklyn diehards, the older people who had been born and raised within a one-mile radius of where they currently lived. Polish butchers sold sausages behind white linoleum counters. Dollar stores sold flavored water and plastic flowers.
As the weather warmed, people rose, eager to live again. A couple passed me walking down the street, he in acid-wash denim and she in rubber boots. He picked up his pace, grabbing her by the hand and pulling her forward as they began to run, flying down Manhattan Avenue laughing and both taking turns calling out names in Polish. I hoped they felt as beautiful as they looked, their moving reflection bouncing off of the windows of Chinese massage parlors and cheap liquor stores.
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