Home

I hadn't successfully crossed the street myself until I was 13 years old. It was a two lane street, and I waited until all the cars cleared my range of sight, before I ran across. This was before we left home.

The Summer after we migrated to Secaucus and compressed our lives to fit the narrows of a Parkway hotel room , I found myself strolling on mile stretches of service roads that connected its dismal outskirts with its bustling town center. We stayed here, anticipating the spiritual call to leave. The elders dreamed of us returning, and courtroom victories, and reversed eviction notices the first couple of months; signs they interpreted as "Soon." It became the answer and the prayer.

I'd fumble around the word "home," replacing it with back or here: "What time are you coming back?"..."When will you be here?" This wasn't home. It was somewhere on the way to someplace else. A staleness swirled like the only air circulating our space. I could hear it in our breathing. Being so close now, as we've never been before, made us irritated with each other. There was no space for frustration to diffuse itself , so it hung around us like fog.

"You never let me go anywhere!"

"Aaleah, you lie. You does go out more than any of the others. Matter a fact I think I let you out too much. Always involved in this in that, can never stay put. Lord, Father, Give me strength." I’d interpret this as "yes, but try again tomorrow, when the time might be better." And the time was usually better. It was how I got the walls around me to give, the slightest bit, where I could start to see the sky that went on forever beyond them.

This past summer, I went somewhere magical: a place Where long dried stems hung over our heads like railroads of frail enchanted limbs and seed pods fell like black snow; where everything we said was translated by our hands into the"bass" and "tone" tongue of tall wooden drums and the language we learned seeped into the hallway where it exploded like firecrackers as it hit the low ceiling before the sanctuary, where the sun had been invited to harmonize through high windows with young beaming voices that traveled like rays carrying warmth , and light. It was a summer camp job at an art’s school for kids. In the morning, the bus would take me along the river to the Junction. I’d take the Northeast Corridor train to North Elizabeth then walk a straightaway under hanging trees, until the sky went on forever again, and I reached the school. I came far from the girl who avoided busy streets because she didn’t know how to cross them.

I’d return to the Parkway Residence with a day’s worth of anecdotes draped around my shoulders like a blanket. Some days I’d fall asleep still wearing my sneakers and nametag and glasses. I’d wake up hours later to Mom asking how work was and to Grandma commenting on how quickly I “dropped” as soon as I walked through the door, a real blanket covering me, my sneakers: tucked underneath the bed, and my nametag and glasses: resting neatly on a bedside table.

We'll call here home now , but never out loud: only in the way we greet each other when we return from whichever direction we had traveled from, or in the way the last person nearest the light switch begins a

chain of "goodnight"s before shutting it off for the night, the way everything has a resting place, and we don’t disturb each other’s dreaming. Because we still hold onto soon, and when it comes, I'll still be here. When soon comes I’ll be travelling the sky and the walls of here will be two heavy concrete arms cradling the whole world.