I am who I am. Those are powerful words. I’m referring specifically in correspondence to the various homes that I’ve called my own. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never really felt completely at ease in any of these locations. I could add on and say that I am who I am despite the neighborhood/s I lived in. I grew up in Forest Park, Georgia in a small house at the bottom of a hill. Before I was born, I’ve been told that there was a forest next to our house and things were great. However, the trees were chopped down and the government installed a cul-de-sac where they stood. I’ll be frank, some low level people moved in and quickly showed their stance to my family and I. They were racist, mainly against my mom but that hate spread to all of us. It never got too violent but there were several incidents. We did have a very kind neighbor next to us, so it wasn’t all bad. We packed up and headed west to California when I was seven.
Next was London Street in San Francisco. After staying with my grandma for a bit, we got ourselves a place, courtesy of my uncle. This place was very trying for my family because of next door neighbors, their dog, and things between my uncle’s family and my mom. We got out to Vallejo in the early 2000s.
Springhill Garden apartment complex certainly had its share of incidents in the seven years I lived there. “Scenarios” but I leave it at that. We moved just up the hill to another complex called Avian Glen after that. Like all of them, it’s been interesting and just like all of them, started off good then got worse. There have been some sketchy “situations”, so to speak.
So that’s it. Those are my homes. I haven’t really felt connected to any of them, so they haven’t shaped me. They’re given me experiences but my family has been the main thing that matters and continues to matter. It doesn’t matter where I lay my head.
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