The Five People You Meet in Brooklyn

It always felt sparse to say that I lived in Brooklyn. The reality was, I experienced Brooklyn. Brooklyn permeated me.

When I walked down Broadway in Bushwick, I became unified with the multi-sensory chaos. The salons advertising Jerry Curl perms; the Santera shop selling Evil Eyes and dream-catchers; the windows full of cheap acrylic furniture; the homeless people whose yellow irises always latched onto me in the crowd, yelping their plea for spare change. All of it strained through my thin membranes, becoming a strong tea for me to soak in on the train. I could never be indifferent or separate from anything I saw. How could I also take pride in such putridness?

Bushwick also felt like my soulmate, the place that most closely mirrored my inner world. He was cocky in his knowledge that he would never bore me, and this made him my life’s great seducer; my Bel-Ami, my Comte Valmont. No other noun had been able to indemnify me against boredom, the worst malaise in my compendium of hypochondria. As much as I feared throwing up from uncooked chicken at the Halal Food place, or say — having an allergic reaction to shrimp, and my throat closing up in a crowded restaurant, I feared boredom above death.