Bodies Remember

Luisa A. Igloria

Nov 1

Is it ever hard to imagine the people  we used to be before we became  the people we are now? There was the room I left behind in a house that bears little resemblance now to my childhood home; and the room I rented when I first came to this cold country—on the fifteenth floor  of a building filled mostly with immigrants,  smells of steamed rice and curry as you rode  up the elevator, the view of the skyline through the window like a photograph above the cheap green sofa found at the Maxwell Street market and the peeling linoleum.  You still talk about five siblings growing up in the lower floor of the two-bedroom brownstone  your family bought, while your uncles  took the upper unit. There was the tiny space in back which  you'd turned into your room; among some storage boxes, a clothes rack and a cot.  Some things haven't changed,  though. I am always still  looking for uncluttered space, the widest view. You like to fill a room with things though now there's room to stash them somewhere else.