Wednesday, January 15, 2014

A city returned.

New York, I've missed you, and your mad, manic, beautiful energy. Let's dance, shall we?

Friday, January 10, 2014

2010 - 2014

I started writing here in 2010. Before that I wrote somewhere else, on another blog, now private, years before. Before that I started in a little black-covered journal bought for me in Berkeley when I was 8. I remember writing about a trip to the beach with my mother and my brother. These collections seem to act as chapters in my life.

This chapter is over. And while I would have thought there'd be something akin to a nuanced exit, a proud bow, a poignant retrospective, there isn't, just like there wasn't before. I don't know what exactly awakens the knowledge that it's time to close doors and move on, but I'm there, and there's no poetry in it. I have no more words. I've written many. I'm ready to stop for a while and see where I find myself. This blog started in June 2010 in New York, days before I landed in Port-au-Prince. It carried through to London in late 2012 - an extension of Haiti not only for what it inspired in me, but also for something found there. And then it came to find me here - Los Angeles, late 2013. That was unexpected.

Shortly after the start of this year - 2014 - I sent my last Western Union wire to Haiti - payment for exams to get Jenny through her fourth year of high school, the final obligation to a promise made. Sending her the text with the confirmation number felt different than the times before. It was something like turning the final page. Haiti is in the past. London is in the past. I'm soon returning to New York - a city unlike any other in which I see possibilities not possible before. There's closure in the circuity.

To say I've been changed between the time I started this blog and this point at which I end it simplifies the truth of it. I am the same person, and I'm not at all. I stop writing now for a reason. It's time to take account. There's so much familiar in me, and so much foreign. I am more grounded in who I am, even as I test my footing.

Thanks to all of you I've come to know throughout the experience of this mad leap of faith. There are too many to name, but I count myself bettered for having had the chance to cross paths. I wanted to find something. You helped unearth much of it. Mesi anpil. I feel closer to who I want to be for all of what this has been.