Toward Camden

by Mercy Romero

I can’t get in there anymore. It isn’t private. It isn’t ours. But it is open and boarded up now. A condemned public and a private property. Perhaps the loss, the opening, makes it all the more mine? Ours? Maybe it is more available than ever.

I didn’t know the birds did this. That they silence me, accompany me; it is a gift of a moment I cling to, even still. In Camden, when I was despairing, all this a reminder. You are not alone.

This was the landscape of our imagination, not some wondering about a particular past, not very much, but a being in the present, held together there, in and by, holding it together too.

For me, the idea of that house, our house, being a house for people, for a Vietnamese family, if the new owner holds onto it, keeps it for his own people or rents it to others. I find comfort there now. That other people will be housed here too, that they will live abundantly here, it brings me happiness that day and today. We didn’t profit in a sale. We can attend to our lives, our memories, and our being in place; we can say goodbye and return many times, always. For me this understanding, this meaning, isn’t quantifiable or exchangeable, but it is a set of relations worth passing on.

I wonder, how long will Camden last?