Priscilla Rodriguez
6 February 2013
Mrs. Rosenfeld
ENC 1101

To many people Hialeah is a place of disgrace and danger, but I see it as my sanctum. I grew up there, the place where they say you shouldn’t let your children wonder off or let them out of your sight because it’s a dangerous place but it’s where my best childhood memories are. My cousin Donald lived in Hialeah. He lived in an apartment, where the roadways were filled with liter, beer bottles, cigarette buds, weed baggies, and blunt papers. The parking spaces were barely noticeable and the grass was almost as tall as me, but I saw this place and my home. The exterior was horrendous but the inside was magical.
The kitchen was filled with all of our favorite foods, the dining room table was clean but you can still see the marker stains Donald and I left one day after trying to finish his project in a rush to go play outside, and instead of cleaning it like we should have we placed a mat to cover up the stain in the mean time which was never removed because it was too late. The living room was the place where we would build a castle with the couch pillows and watch wrestling while acting out each move, the living room always had a distinctive smell than any other room because it’s were me and my cousin decided to light up fireworks in the house and burned a part of the couch and the ceiling. The stairs were probably the most memorable part of the house. It’s where all the crying, accidents, laughter, and games would happen. Rodriguez 2
As a kid, one would always invent their own games. We had many different dangerous and exciting games. One was that we would wrap ourselves in many different sheets and slide down head first down the stairs, I’d have many bruises the next day but I saw them as warrior bruises. Donalds room was like the treasure room, it has all my favorite Nintendo 64 games and his bunk bed was always turned into a fort. That room was always filled with curiosity and prank calls. There was always something new and interesting happening in there. All my first memories are in that house, my first sleep over, the first time I saw drugs, my first kiss, my first boyfriend, the first time I ran away, and my first time feeling like I was living. But sadly not everything is forever, my aunt had to move to Colorado and my cousin had to go with her so they packed up their belongings and left.
After a couple months the apartment still wasn’t rented out, so I went back to the place that had given me so much joy. As I walked in, sadness overwhelmed me, because what was once the safest and blissful place I knew was never going to be the same. I walked through the apartment and noticed that you can still see the skid marks on the floor from all the times Donald and I would move the couch to play paper baseball or when we would make a failed attempt at building our own tent. Walking up the stairs you can still see the dents on the railing from all the falling, and the scratches on the wall from racing up the stairs and trying to hold on to something while being pulled down. Donalds old room still had the stain marks of the spaghetti food fights we would have, and big white stain in the middle of the room where the dog pooped in his room when we weren’t allowed to have the dog upstairs so we tried to clean it with Clorox. As I was walking down stairs I realized why was I so sad when this house is full of memories that would last me a lifetime, and as I stepped out knowing it would be my last time, I smiled because I knew that someone else can grow up and just maybe they might be as lucky as I was.