Photo by Julia Karas

My neighborhood is disgusting.

It's the moldy, big toenail of Brooklyn—way, way in the back. Behind all the rooftop restaurants and fluffy dogs. It lies beyond the things people want to see.

It's not hidden because it’s a rose in concrete; it's all the junk the city hides in its guest room. Canarsie is the prince of garbage, and at the top of its head is the last stop on the L train.

It’s a mystery how it’s still standing. No one ever swipes through a turnstile; we squish together like kids on a field trip and bully our way through the bus gate. No Uber wants to come around, so there's a line of suspicious men along the front wall yelling “taxi." The color on the walls is so chipped you’d think they threw 1 can of paint and called it a day. The platform looks like an entryway to hell.

In the summer, the vines are so overgrown they make a canopy over the tracks, trapping all that thick, pee-smelling air in the station. In the winter, we get snow up to our knees but never see a single salt truck (because if they bothered to clean, it would revert in a week, anyway).

The commuters are either teenagers who think if they use enough cologne they won't have to shower or cranky, old women. The rest are homeless. The lady who runs the help booth is always watching her telenovelas with her back turned to the microphone. The man who runs the newsstand will bump prices up if he thinks you’re ugly.

The whole place is flush with trash, spit, and vomit, but it still somehow becomes the place to be.

Somehow, within it, I know I belong. It takes most people half a million years to get there, but they still come. They have to sit there for 10 minutes until I pick them up because they’re scared, but they still come. They make sure to save a seat for their complaints, but they still come.

You can catch the moment when they suddenly know where they are. The train doors open, and they don't scrunch their nose. They begin to forge a home in the station out of broken glass and gum wrappers. They walk through the bus gate with no hesitation. They never go for the car on the far right. They breeze right by the newsstand.

Every time a new person visits, I bare my belly to them; the station patiently tells my stories, knowing we’ll make new ones soon. We’ll retell adventures of serenades and gentrified Wendy’s. We’ll solve mysteries. (Where did that man get the turtles he’s selling?) We’ll hop on the train and fly off to the Wizarding World of Manhattan.

Strangers have faces, and faces have names. The pizza shop by the side entrance becomes Armando’s. The last stop creates a lot of firsts for me. My first kiss (that I enjoyed). My first catcall. The first time I walked home by myself.

It slowly started to mean something to me, and in 2 years, I'll have to wave it all goodbye. Probably sooner.

When I come back, the same people I used to see will be different. The L train will be different, but maybe the whole thing will move like Williamsburg.

You can already start to see it seep through the cracks like a disease. The McDonald's to the right of the station used to be ridden with gang activity. Now, all of a sudden, you can order off a tablet while charging from a USB. The buses that exit through the gates we jump got new chairs. Now there's a fluorescent screen letting us know what the next 5 stops are. Nobody wants to stick their Arizona cans in the space between the window and the seat anymore.

When I leave, maybe the faces of the station will morph as the McDonald's did. I’ll come back from college (or wherever I'm off to) and realize my tiny house of memories has been destroyed. Maybe I won't have to sit on stained and carved out wooden benches—there’ll be brand new metal seats with backs. The whole thing might smell like new paint. There might even be a sculpture or two in the corner. But maybe Armando won't be able to keep up with the “New L Train” rent and slowly go out of business. Maybe they’ll take the TV out of the help booth. Maybe they’ll all stay, but they won't recognize me anymore. I’ll stop belonging.

Or maybe I'm just being dramatic.

It might just stay how it was meant to be.

Disgusting.