I woke up this morning flashing back on my past. Images of being a teenager and working at my mother's job downtown, it wasn't that great of a job, but I remember being sent out to paper the street with flyers, and the thing that struck me, even then, was the beauty of that side street in Chelsea-- the trees full and shady covering the streets, the brownstone buildings with their front stoops and wrought iron railings. I remember thinking, "oh, I'll never be able to live in a place like that. I wish I could," and not five years later I did, in my garden apartment with my sister and her crazy boyfriend. It was a great apartment and a great neighborhood, but it only lasted six months before the boyfriend flipped out and I just wanted out.

Me and my sister found a place on Elizabeth Street, in what is now called "Nolita" (a catchy name, in a gentrifying sort of way). We lived out of boxes for a while, until the landlord could finish it. He'd needed our money so badly that he let us live in half the place, just so he could renovate the other apartments and charge outrageous rents.

Real estate in New York City always shocks me, although it shouldn't.

How can I be paying over a thousand dollars rent and still not have heat on the coldest day of the year? The temperatures haven't been this low for a hundred years, actually. I slept in a sweatshirt and a mound of blankets, and was determined not to get up until I actually had heat in the apartment-- oh well.

The memories took over.

They always talk about the hottest days of the year, and the confrontations that happen then. It makes sense, it does-- the temperature goes up, so do people's tempers, but what about the coldest days?

I think they bring on loneliness, or if not loneliness, then being with one's self.

Thus the memories. Like the ones of winters in the Bronx. I think that was the low point in my life. That was a true slum, and the land lord, a true slum lord. I slept every night in a maroon ski cap, changing from pajamas into school clothes while still underneath the covers. There was never hot water then. My mom and grandma used to heat pots on the stove so we could bathe. The ceiling in the bedroom had fallen in from some leak somewhere, and went for years with a gaping hole. We breathed ancient plaster and who knew what else.

That wasn't a place for children. Or for parents. Or grandparents. Or any type of human being. It was for the cockroaches and the stray cats. And no matter how bad it was inside, how cold, how infested, when you stepped outside it was worse. There was a crack house across the street and gangs running up and down the avenue. I was a tiny blanquita, a half white, half puertorican girl, and I knew better than to spend any time out there. I used to cry if my mom tried to send me to the laundromat. I stayed inside and read books.

I think I knew something on a gut level, even if I didn't see what could happen to me. I wonder if my little brother's life would have been different if he hadn't grown up there. He told me years later that those black eyes he got while "playing football" were actually because he always had to fight to defend himself. My mom took him out of there by the time he was thirteen, the year I went away to college, but I have to wonder if what he saw on those streets during his childhood started the drugs and the trouble. I wonder if he had grown up on those nice, leafy brownstone streets of Chelsea, would he have ended up in jail after a psychotic break induced by drugs? Would he have grabbed the neighbor girl, not doing anything, but scaring her, then sitting down on the neighbor couch to wait for the cops the neighbor grandma called? This was in Florida, where they take "three strikes" seriously. Even if strike one and two are shop lifting and stealing a bike-- kids crimes. If it hadn't been for the Bronx, where would my brother be now?

If. If. If.

But to be fair, I think I gained something in the Bronx. I learned something about survival, about the beauty of people, even people who are discarded by society. You've never seen anything as heart-rendingly glorious as a child who lives through insanity and struggle and comes out with his head held high. And this is not an uncommon thing. It's a very common thing. It's a human thing. We will make it through, if it doesn't break us. And children are the very best at doing it, the most flexible. I guess it's the way we're made.

I wonder if the people who come out of poverty stronger and more beautiful make up for all the people who are broken by it?

This is not something I have an answer for.

I think that I am one of those who made it out. Who transformed the ghetto into a fertile ground for my life. I have to honor it, even if I refuse to live again in the Bronx.

And to be truthful, even though my apartment is freezing on this below zero morning, my landlord has been in the building for the last three days trying to fix the broken pipe and the furnace, and bugging me to no tomorrow about making sure my heat is on. That is not a slum, and I am not back in the Bronx.

So, I'll wrap myself in blankets and put on extra socks and surround myself with the art and poetry of my life. I'll sit in front of my computer and remember.

It's not such a bad thing after all.