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Today a piece of my heart is sewn shut, I close the door on a home that was once mine and mine alone. The only home I’ve ever owned like that. I collect whatever art I did not leave on the walls and I lock the door for good on whatever I leave behind in it.

This home held my grandmother’s refrigerator, my few intimate moments with my mother in her later life, my independence. My first ever moves towards fulfilling a life that I wanted took place in this home. My first ever mile run, my routines in general were formed here. I had moments with my daughter that were hard and that were tender. 

I collect from this place all the original art that ever meant anything to me. I collect my red astronaut concepts, the planets I painted as murals on the wall I say a goodbye to. My rainbow kitchen, and the love affairs that were shared on my purple sofa.

I say goodbye to paint on the floor. I say good bye to dishes washed by hand. To my daughter’s colorful room covered in Coro Coro advertisements and posters. The curtains hanging where doors belong. To pipes that burst and projects that challenge me to grow as an adult.

To dangerous neighbors and a neighborhood so dirty that the weeds decorate the cracked pavement with their colors because no amount of oppressions can stop the world from reclaiming her identity as an unyielding artist.

I say good bye to the home where I rolled my first joint and quit my last pack of cigarettes. I say good bye to the place where my childhood sweetheart and I drank a full bottle of red and bottle of white, then danced in the kitchen in refrigerator light before Taylor Swift ever published such romanticisms as a song, strangling the memory for so many young poets.

I say good bye to my first garden, and the one sun flower that bloomed because the soil was so dirty and the cars that parked in front of my house kept rolling over it.

I say good bye to being 10 minutes from the heart of New York City on a bus ride. I say good bye to swamp summers near the airport taking photos of the take-offs against neon globalized sunsets. I say good riddance to a trailer park, and I’ll miss you to a shanty trailer who with all of its might kept me and my child safe from elements, people, eyes, and loved us even before I knew how to love it back.

So sweetly I wish to say, now;

thank you so much, and good bye.

Paige Six | 2021