A New Place After Five Years Dying

we are well into December and I have been in my new room for six weeks.  My room looks out  over the street.  When the kids get out of school they make a lot of noise.  I am on the second floor, and there is bodega beneath my windows.

The fire trucks, police cars and ambulances intermittently pass, making a huge racket with their sirens and flashing lights.


The man who leases the apartment, I have never seen.  he is Arab, and I imagined, my first few days, that I was in a terrorist cell.  However, he has a friend downstairs who does a lot of favors for me.  For this I am grateful, and I have come to see that not all Arabs are terrorists, they simply want to make life good for their families, and buy their meat at the Halal store.

My ex-husband came to see my on my birthday.  He brought roses.  That was last week.  Last night I noticed the roses were dying, so I pulled a few off their stems and put them in a bag to dry.  I plan to crush them when dried, put them in a saucepan and make potpourri from them.

I pulled off two or three, and peel the petals that were still fresh.  I put water in gold bowl, floated the rose petals in it, and placed it on the sink in the bathroom.  I don't know what good this will do, but I imagine the water will begin to smell like roses.  When I go in the bathroom I dip my fingers in the bowl and touch the velvety texture of the flowers.  Why do I do this?  In memory of a love that is ill-fated, but well-intentioned.

He is leaving for Australia a few days before Christmas.  We are divorced now, since the summer, part of the reason I up and abruptly left my apartment of fifteen years.  I left the furniture, the linens and most of the kitchenware.  I went to Brooklyn, fifteen miles away.  I stayed there for five months. rooming with a woman who was uncomfortable with me because the man she loved paid inordinate attention to me.

When it got too tense, I decided to leave.  November had already started, and the nights were longer.  It was too cold of course, to go to Coney Island and sit on the beach.  All summer I had gone to the beach in the mornings, still wearing a two piece bathing suit as if I were a young girl.  My tan deepened, I felt good.  Sometimes I bought a Corona from the Spanish man who walked up and down the beach trailing a cooler.  I sat and looked out over the ocean, smoking a cigarette, sipping the cold cerveza.  Around three o'clock, when the afternoon crowds came in, I packed my things and walked back to the train to go home.

All very dramatic, I suppose.  Staring out over the ocean, laying in the sun and thinking, thinking, thinking, about the end of my marriage, the end of my job, my new status as a wanderer.  It is appropriate for a woman who lost the one man she would ever marry, but strangely enough, she was not quite in tatters over it.  It is as if she always knew that it would happen.  As if she agree from the beginning to a hopeless union.  As if she always knew that he would walk away, and calmly accepted it.  Only because she knew this was the only man, the man of few words who neglected her and acted as if she wasn't there, she knew this was the only man she could actually say "I do" to.  It might have been because she knew only a man who barely acknowledged her would at least never stand in her path when she decided to do something.

So when the weather turned dark and cold, and the wind threatened its howling through the streets of Brooklyn, I again packed a bag, went back to the Bronx, walked into a realtor in a neighborhood I knew nothing about, and rented a room.

It is somewhat comfortable for me, and soon,  as I work on my laptop, as I hone the small habits that comfort me, the radio, the cable tv, the cigarettes, the iced coffee, the chance meetings with the neighbors, the small homey touches I put here and there, soon the pieces of my broken life will reform in a new and wonderful way.  I still have dreams.