By Shermaya Paul

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This piece serves as a reflection of my relationship with the borough, Brooklyn. I’ve lived here since I was born and have developed a special connection with this place that I call home.

Brooklyn raised me. It’s served as a third parent throughout the almost seventeen years of my life, and I’ve seen it at its absolute best and absolute worst. It all started with the apartment building I’ve lived in my whole life and the familiar stores and faces that make up the community I live in. It branches out to other parts of Brooklyn, parts I’ve yet to see but hear about, parts I’ve seen but never experienced. Brooklyn is my inspiration. The seed where my dreams originate, the vines where my nightmares grow, and the bed of flowers where my peace continues to blossom.

I dream Brooklyn. I think the apartment building that I live in now will be permanently ingrained into my memory. Every inch of this place has already been touched and explored. I’ve only ever known this place. I know it even better because my father used to be the building super, in charge of cleaning and basic maintenance. That meant my sisters and I would occasionally tag along with him as he worked if we were bored of playing in the apartment all day. The journey included a quick walk up the stairs into an empty apartment awfully identical to ours. It was there that I learned how to paint walls. How the thick smell of the paint filled my nostrils and how I had to gently hold the small brush to not touch the dark brown floorboards with the white paint. My parents had their own personal surveillance service there. Almost everyone knew my father as “Paul” and my sisters and I as “Paul’s girls.” I felt like I was always being monitored in our building. Sometimes we’d run through the halls on the heels of my father, and tenants would open their doors as we passed to say hi or to remind him about their leaky faucet or lifting floorboards.  

Brooklyn is a nightmare and it creates them too. I love that I live on a main street. Everything you need is less than a five-minute walk away from our front door. We had an amazing pizzeria in the same building as us, and a Payless, a Conway, and a Chase Bank down the street. We had several grocery stores to choose from, clothing stores, restaurants, and laundromats. Daily errands with my mom were always fun because I knew where the stores were and liked to know where we were going next and what we were looking for. Things, unfortunately, eventually changed. It started slowly: the pizzeria went out of business. This was a personal loss to my family because on nights my mom didn’t feel like cooking, my sisters and I could no longer run downstairs for a large cheese pie and a liter of soda. Then the Conway went out of business, followed closely by the Payless and other stores that just couldn’t keep up with the times. Newer stores took their places: now we have an Urgent Care, a department store, and a lounge. It made me sad to see all of these familiar places go, but seeing the people go with them hurt me the most. These new stores meant a whole lot of new faces. Soon enough my part of Brooklyn had caught the newest strain of gentrification with which the rest of Brooklyn had already been sick. I’d never seen a white person in our “Little Caribbean” until then—but now, it’s pretty normal. It was scary to see these new faces because as a timid little girl, meeting new people wasn’t always something I loved doing. It was a nightmare for little me—but it hasn’t always been.

My peace blossoms here. If my family had decided to get up and move somewhere else, I wouldn’t have developed this connection to Brooklyn at all. I feel as though I am finally old enough to see Brooklyn and appreciate its complete beauty. I’m old enough to see the fact that our building isn’t as big as it once seemed. My hand, which once interlocked with my mother’s, now swipes my card while I’m alone running errands for her. In a way, I’ve grown into and am beginning to grow out of Brooklyn. It has watered and weeded my flowers over the years, but now it’s time that I am repotted into a different pot with new soil—space to grow new roots. Brooklyn is full of infinite possibilities, and I know that the same goes for me too. 

Process

“The Garden of Brooklyn” was created during my college application process. This was a time where I was doing a lot of self-reflection and introspection especially when it came to my life and experiences so far. So when I was prompted to talk about the place I grew up in, the words couldn’t stop flowing. I have to say that this is piece most directly represents my identity and is one of the best things that I’ve written to date. I like to refer to this as the diamond that was created from all the pressure I was experiencing during the college application process, it is a true reflection of my love and adoration for the place I grew up in and the place that shaped me into the person I am today.