the purple room

My new room is purple. It's a deep purple and I painted most of it myself with key help from some friends. I like to think of myself as living here, in this old house in Bed Stuy, writing from a purple room. I am guessing that I will come to associate this moment in my life with the color purple, which until now, I haven't really cared for. It just struck me as a good color for a room. I have a view of a busted garden from my window. It's all dead grass and fallen fruit, a tree larger than the three stories of this brownstone.

I dig the time I get to spend here alone, but for a few nights, I have had the company of a caring companion who falls asleep after I do, hammers things, and who sat out with me on the stoop during a thunderstorm. (The storm was amazing – I experienced rain like you never can in a building. When you are encased in brick, far up from the ground, a storm becomes just part of the view. It's not like when you're sitting out on the street and you can see rain pooling in the gutters, people gathering under the awnings of bodegas to stay dry, the way the whole street brightens like it's day when there is lightning, and the way the crack of thunder seems to start right above your head and unfold over the whole neighborhood).

I am twenty minutes away from where I grew up in Fort Greene. Where I am in Bed Stuy reminds me of Fort Greene ten years ago. Beautiful houses in disrepair, the G train, cafes and restaurants like lone satellites every couple of blocks, gunshots, schools, Golden Krust, open vans parked on the street playing jazz or Motown, old ladies perched like sentinels on stoops to survey everything that happens on the block, churches, the familiar sound of someone scraping ice from a cart to sell piraguas.

It's better for me to be here although I am already homesick for Fort Greene. If I were at home at my parents’ house, I would be watching Buffy DVDs in my pajamas and eating Indian food I can't afford, trying to escape the empty spaces in me by not moving at all. To stir would be to wake all those fears and possibilities up, make them alive and burning, looking for me by their own awful light. So I would just sit. Sit and steep myself in the sweat of our living room, feeling heavy and round, sick with secrets.

The purple room is supposed to be space for me to be still yet work to confront things. The college I went to is a tough place for poor girls of color like me, but it was easier than home in many ways because I had the freedom to build an identity for myself. After four years away, I returned to Brooklyn last summer and had to find a way to fit the woman I had become into the Old World of home.

Old school paradigms for Dominican good girls forbid all sorts of things – from boyfriends to girlfriends to birth control, beer, moving out before you’re married, disagreeing with your mother, and being fat.

The old cliché goes, "The truth will set you free." But I would like to contribute an addendum to the saying:
Only if you let it.

And it is in that spirit, of submitting to the truth about myself and my dreams, that I write to you, from my purple room.