Personal Narrative Essay

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Someone on Tumblr posted about when they played a practical joke on their parents who went on vacation, without their knowing they moved all the furniture in their house one inch to the left. When their parents returned, they spent a few days stumbling around walking and bumping into everything. Returning to Bushwick to live with my mother’s side of the family was a bit like that. Not only had the neighborhood changed, but the ease of just coming home was gone because everything that was normal, that my mind didn’t give a second thought to had shifted. Sometimes it’s just a place I live because Canarsie still feels like home and sometimes it feels like home when connecting with the people around me. It made me question: what is home? Home is…show more content…
However moving can be especially hard, like wearing new shoes, they're all stiff and foreign and make you walk funny, but once you break them in, you don’t even notice you have them on. Returning to live in Bushwick, full time and not just here and there like when I was younger was like breaking in new shoes. It’s not quite how I remember it, like noticing that you’re tall enough to see over the counter, the perspective of it has changed drastically. I have memories of the smell of charcoal, hamburgers and charred hotdogs, the swells of music in the background, dusted with the buzz of conversation and punctuated by the loud cackles of laughter from my elders. Or the quiet sunny summer afternoons of my grandmother sitting on the stoop, a cooler with a large block of ice and after she shaved it she’d ask what color syrup I wanted, pretending that the nook between the pillar of the stairs and it’s ledge wall was an ice cream truck or the kids on the block playing skully and scattering when a car drive down the block. In comparison to now, the block has changed, largely in part to the increase in gentrification and everyone is older now. Our lives are grey hues, filled with a stream of bills and paperwork and 9 to 5s, straws of responsibilities added to our backs. It’s passing greetings and farewells in the halls, the doors forever

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