A Place Of My Own

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my apartment?

When I first moved in here all I did was sit around in wonder, with a pure-eyed peace-feeling stare. I loved the lines of the walls, the smoothness, the light. I used to open up the great tall window in front of my writing table and smoke cigarettes sitting on the ledge with my feet on the roof and my heart in the tree. I would talk to the moon, or just listen in a satiated way to the traffic going by.

We moved out of the suburbsprawl that had tangled its way down route 2 from Baltimore and in to a house in the woods when I was a pre-teen. We went from a neighborhood full of kids with rat tails and kickball games and swingsets and snowball stands and dancing under the street lights in driveways purple boomboxes pumping to no one, just Sean and me, and the woods. And Lindsey and Darby who lived across the street in this big old farmhouse that had secret cellar tunnels cemented off but that you could access through trap doors in the field. My dad left three months after that he moved to New York. Manhattan always terrified me and repelled me after that. I started smoking cigarettes then and stealing from the liquor cabinet they kept downstairs with the heavy-hinged door. I put a sign on the door to my room, it was a manilla envelope with a fake address and it said Kelly's place on it and I think maybe that is when it started, my need and ache to always have a room or place of my own.

Later, after I graduated college mom was selling the house. I stayed on in Chestertown where I got my degree and got clean, it was 2002, for what was meant to be only the summer. I was working three jobs, two in town and one two hours away at the beach. My dad's best friend died and my dad was suddenly back--just like that, 12 years later. I was an adult now or supposed to be so I made decisions like an adult should. He was depressed and didn't get off the couch at my grandparents and aunt and uncles little wood house at the beach. I worked there at the beach it was beautiful fall and pulled doubles at a seafood house uptown three days a week and tried to feed dad peanut butter and jelly but my father, who loves food second only to gin and golf, wouldn't even eat. Then I drove to Chestertown to be a coffee shop barista in the days and wear a button down tux top at a white linen the other nights of the week. At the coffee shop I fell in love with a quiet boy who had soft brown eyes.

He was from Chestertown and so it was that I stayed.

By December of that year they offered me a job teaching night classes ESL. I didn't want to I had no background for it but she kept pressuring so I agreed. The first night I was coming up one hall there were students coming towards me from another, I closed my eyes and took a breath and relaxed so I could feel my heart open then just said a prayer in my head: Direct my thoughts and actions. Help me to love. Hola! I shouted to the little Mexicans with strong bright eyes and they smiled so warm and that was it, eight years ago, I was done.

In November, last year 2009, I moved here to this place finally for the first time in my life, my little tiny place all of my own. I love to be here and revel in how much I've I enjoy my own quiet home. It took me a long time. On Friday last week I stepped down from my job. That two nights a week gig teaching ESL eventually led to full-time at a Community College, where I worked hours on end with three other people to establish the community english and high-school diploma program. I poured every last bone breath and blood in to that job since they took it from the public schools in 08. It carried me through one of the most difficult transitions of my life, but now I am through, through the change of being my own woman, being single, being strong, being alone. May 14 is my last day and then soon I will leave the Eastern Shore.

It's been a long, long time coming. Who knew all along I just needed a little tiny place of my own?