Revisiting a neighbourhood I was forced out of when I wished to stay, a community I came to be deeply enmeshed with. Routines at the shops nearby my old home. The lots I'd practice stunts in and the people I'd see walking by on a regular basis. Its been not even a handful of years and a third of the shops I regular have been replaced by expensive looking bakeries, hair salons, boutique clothes shops, jewellery stores, and more. The gentrification seems to be getting faster and faster. Entire community staples, demolished into rubble, replaced by another fucking bank. Another fucking sports bar. Rent prices doubled, tripled. More cars, more suits and condescending scowls, more sterile streets. The few safe spaces in the community for homeless folks to occupy have been replaced by bright windows, cold hostile ground. The forces at play do not care for the communities they fracture. The people they alienate from their homes, forcing them to rebuild again. New people always come. Rich people. Hostile privileged insular people. People who don't smile, or say hello. People who take pictures of folks like me when they think I don't see them doing it. People who think they deserve a say in the future of the homes theyve displaced as they act with palpable hostility towards the history they aim to replace. The only history that matters to them is the ones that let them sell it back to the people they're forcing away. How sick and shameful a life. How sad and empty the concept of community becomes. An ever molting husk, sinewous skin still clinging to muscle, peeled back with force, rupturing the blood vessels as everyone carries on and pretends not to see the crimson ocean they are drowning in. Everyone can smell the death though, the loss, the pain, they wear it on their face, a furrowed nose ridge crunched up in an ever present stench, no desire to grow sweet smells back again, only to plaster perfume all through their home until they forget how to smell altogether, or until the disease they've ignored steals the sense away from them. They're sick. It makes me sick to see them seek such nihilistic ambivalent excess. And we'll die one day. Sooner than ever. I'm grateful for the beacons of community who remain. The folks who remember. The folks who engage and say hello. The folks who still seem to care about something other than themselves.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @daffodil's post: