1.

It is Sunday and I’m on a train, leaving home for home. The colossus propels itself along the tracks, northbound, and I have ninety minutes to steel my mind for New York City again. I’m thinking of “safe space,” the concept of it. Home — New Jersey — is the safe space, the last refuge, the one pinpoint within the universe to where I can retreat and relax and smack the reset button. I return to myself, or some older version of myself, heavy with familial memories and known streets, the idyllic calm of woods and crickets and rural sprawl. Born into deafening silence broken from time to time by freight trains heard in the distance. I could hear them grinding their gears from my childhood bedroom in Newfield. I grew up in a town called Newfield. I can never return to my mother’s womb, the original safe space, but Newfield — South New Jersey, in whole, is as close as I can get.

2.

Two years in Brooklyn — is it a safe space? It is certainly home, but home is not synonymous with safety. At the time of this writing, I don’t know if Brooklyn is a safe space. I say this because there is slight anxiety behind my eyes as I’m seventy-eight minutes away from Penn Station. I don’t want to go home. But home I must go.

3.

Throughout the weekend, I watched my father and stepmother interact; I watched them in the way I watch most people, from the peripheral, indirect, along the edges. Their five year wedding anniversary approaches and I watched them understanding that I’ve lost all track of time. I’ve disassociated since my divorce from Athena. It would’ve been our four year anniversary this coming October and that it’s not is okay. Things end for a reason. We failed to make a safe space for each other, which happens only when both people are completely open. We were closed off and terrified of truth and I burned it all down.

So I watched my father and stepmother interact, taking notes in my head, jotting down key points in my gray matter. My father is different. Older. Happier. My stepmother plays the starring role in these shifts in his personality. He would never acknowledge the existence of a safe space — too pragmatic — but, in their home, in their relationship, from my eyes where I can see romantic turmoil from two planets away, the safe space exists and within it, he has changed in perceptible, meaningful ways.

On this train hurtling toward the next stop — New Brunswick — I understand the longing, the hunger: I’ve never had a safe space — ever — with a lover.

I never knew I needed one. Never knew I’ve been dying for one this entire time. Never knew I had to work at creating one, both for myself and for/with another.

I am monstrous without a safe space.

4.

The Internet is not a safe space for me right now. Not for over a week. Not since Mike Brown was murdered. Not since the Ferguson police turned on its citizens. Not since riot gear and tear gas, “non lethal” ordinance and armored vehicles, mothers weeping in the streets, white people labeling fed-up citizens “savages,” fools invoking MLK, idiots begging for calm, so I fell back. Disconnected. Sorted out my thoughts. Abandoned the echo chamber. I want to be intimate with my own anger, my own sense of impending doom, and James Baldwin quotes looping looping looping through my dashboard won’t save me. Earth is not a safe space.

There is a photo of me sitting next to my nephew. I haven’t seen him in two years. Lost all sense of time. He’s tall for his age, and reminds me of his father, my brother, and in the photo, he’s making ridiculous faces for camera while I, clutching his Batman action figure, am caught in mid-laugh caused by his comedy. I don’t know if he remembers me from the last time I saw him. He looked at me like — maybe. His mother is a safe space. This family is a safe space. He does not know about Ferguson. As it should be. For now.

5.

Last night while smoking a cigarette on the front step of my father’s home, I thought of wendycortiz’s Excavation — and I thought of the main character in her story, the younger Wendy, who I hoped would find a safe space — and I thought about Brooklyn, and I thought of the fatigue in my body, a kind of exhaustion that told me I’d fall asleep immediately but will experience the tosses and turns sometime in the early morning, and, while smoking, I looked up at the stars and exhaled that gray fog from my mouth, and I thought about possibility, a particular possibility that keeps me awake, that saddens me at times, that makes me nervous, and I think about joy, and joylessness, and I keep thinking and thinking until it becomes rumination and I pump the breaks before rumination ruins me via a depressive episode so —

I make a decision. And then another. And one more. And I stamp out my cigarette and head for bed, brokenhearted that this is my last night in New Jersey. Home is a safe space, and it served me well.

I am one hour away from New York.