Off the L — Far Away Is Here

I never thought I'd live off the L. It’s such a buzz-kill of a train, truly, a gray line across the MTA map that only just traverses 14th St in Manhattan and stretches into North Brooklyn and beyond but is inconvenient to much of Brooklyn and Queens. I always thought of the L train as the hipster-mobile, the gateway to all the “coolness” in Williamsburg, a sense of coolness which then migrated to East Williamsburg, then Bushwick, then god-knows-where and what and how. Who needs any of that? I thought. Whenever anyone would want to hang out off the L it was problematic, annoying, rare. I had built a really good Brooklyn life without it. And now here I am, for the last three months now--here we are--off the L, at the border of Bushwick and Ridgewood, of Brooklyn and Queens where Lee has been living for the past couple years.

What is this place? So many of the young (renters? white ppl?) around seem young and very cool, very styled and also dressed down. There are warehouses with climbing walls, with beer breweries, with a great yoga studio I really love, with dingy bars and cafes, and also with dance clubs and sex clubs I hear and hear about. There are motels, there are dingy bars and cafes. There are parks and teenagers and crinkled soda cans and floating empty plastic bags and weed-smell wafting through the streets. There are babies and families and parties that go on throughout the day and night when the weather is nice. There are cats and small dogs and big dogs. There are flowers and bushes and fences and trees. There are grocery stores and flower shops and hair salons and abandoned buildings and so much good street art. Bad street art too. There is amazing pizza and Thai food and coffee and gas stations and bakeries. There is a huge huge cemetery with Star-of-David gravestones and Arabic-scripted gravestones and Jesus-emblazoned gravestones and Chinese gravestones and if you look towards Manhattan’s skyline from there the right way (Ridgewood does have a “ridge” in it after all) you can see the skyline as a backdrop against all sorts of gravestones, this cemetery where apparently Harry Houdini is buried by a big park with a swampy reservoir full of screaming birds, the park set off, bisected by one of those falling-apart NYC highways.

I’ve been alone in Lee’s neighborhood for three weeks without him, a new girl, exploring her neighborhood, and so now it is a little more my own. Lee just got back from Uganda and Tanzania with so many images and stories to share from so far away. As we talk, or as we are quiet, we listen to records with music from Indonesia, from Mali, from California. Here, I watch the news from Lebanon, watch a revolution that might really be revolutionary, thinking how far away I am. Here, at the edges of these neighborhoods—maybe it feels a little like we live in the in-between, stuck inside the seams of where this place meets that—there is the quiet violence of gentrification, the boom of base late into the early morning hours, the revving of motors, the cat-calls and stare-downs. There are kind smiles and costumed children. And there is the peace of being recognized by the old people on the stoop, by the guy at the slice shop, the peace of being spoken to kindly every once in a while by the young men I pass every day. There is peace at my desk as the world exists on the other side of the glass. I hear lots of conversations out the window—hear all sorts of English and Spanish and yesterday I even caught some Egyptian Arabic. Here we will have Nepali food for a welcome-home dinner and before that sit in a new cafe built into an ancient bar that’s been lovingly restored. This is far away from most everywhere, and everywhere is far away from here.