Capital H, by Ían Guzmán, Center’s fellow during Spring 2018

There’s this place by my apartment

A “multi purpose center.”

A pretty old school kind of place,

not that Fedex doesn’t still provide the services this place advertises.

All i’m saying is the words “WEB CAFÉ”

are painted in big bold red letters right on the window.

And through it, you can see three computers.

Flat screens, so not extremely ancient.

Once, they were the objects that made the place into a ‘web café.’

Now, even through the window you see

–how funny time is—

all they’re doing now is making the place into a storage room.

I can’t honestly say I had any business going in there.

There is just       

a certain acquiescence to the place.

The space around it felt like

a boulder in a really short and narrow stream,

the waves that take off a block away at the tracks of the Q train

ever-changing, ever-sprouting, and re-sprouting, not letting anything stick around

break, and accumulate at Capital H,

into an energy of something steady and secure, growing silently.

That block, right out of the Coney Island bound Q train on avenue H

towards Ocean Avenue,

—this is one big flux

I bet the individuals who sit on the metal rocking chairs which do not rock,

next to the station,

only started hanging out there a few months ago—

the “99 cents” store: probably just a couple of years old.

but in Capital H, there has always been a plan. You can feel it,

radiating,

right there, out from its windows.

Stepping inside is, pretty much, like stepping into a storage room.

Dust, on computers, on blue gray Formica on the left,

plastic-covered furniture on the left. I only noticed the piano.

The owner, or someone before him, had made a small, square booth in the left corner by putting up two extra walls with big windows.

It has a sound system, two more computers, and several stacks of manila folders.

Maybe that’s where the web café was monitored?

As far as I can tell, now he only uses it to keep change in.

It took him a while to unlock whatever he kept in after I paid to print an article.

Contesting Criminality: Illegal Immigration and the Spatialization of Legality,

by Susan Bibler Coutin, if anyone is curious.

She addresses how criminality and illegality are constructed through spatial logics, and how these are contested.

I expected to be directed to the computers on the left, but instead he just let me use what was definitely the one used for official Capital H business.

Later, I noticed the three on the left were unplugged.

We talked a little while the article printed. It took about three minutes for each of the 16 pages to merge.[1]

After the second page, the new household Canon printer ran out of grey ink.

It took me a few tries to communicate this to him effectively and, when I did,

I had to help him figure out how to properly replace the ink.

For the most part, he texted and spoke on the phone.

At one point, another person came in with a stack of CDs and began describing his issue to him in Creole.

I paid him, he struggled to get my change, and I started to walk away.

But, as I did so, I was reminded of a promise I had made to Dr. Benita Sampedro,

while I was serving as student fellow of the Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University

during my senior year in 2017-2018.

I said I would burn her a copy of the documentary film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask,

which I screened on campus as part of my commitment to engage with social justice issues on behalf of the Center.

I never got around to it.

The whole of Spring 2018, if not the two semesters preceding it, felt like one big stack of broken promises and unfulfilled expectations.

It had looked as if I had been given several positions which would give me space

to do a lot in terms of academics and advocacy,

but all my energy ended up being channeled inward.

It all worked out eventually, and i’d been clearing the folders out since May.

This is the last one, as far as I know.

The movie didn’t even fit in the CDs. I ended up sharing it with Dr. Sampedro via google drive,

at which point she suggested I share more about Capital H and my neighborhood through a blog post entry for the Center’s Blog,

which I had also promised.

The things you least expect are often the most fitting,

the ones that feel so properly, cosmically, aligned.

And here I am, writing a story

about focus and patience, alignment and flow,

about time, space, and the lines between change and growth.

As we navigate these lines, there is a lot that feels the need to be

debated.

And ultimately we wonder where and how our intention is focused,

where our commitments will lead,

what it all accumulates into,

and what this space will give off, and make possible.

What we store, what we hoard, and what lives in the decision to do so tells a story, sure,

but, more than that, these give away what we align ourselves with,

and what we regard as possible.

What dust do we allow to settle, and where?

It’ll gather on tom’s head, that’s for sure.

But is it doing so because he fizzled out of use as other growth was worked on,

or in spite of it?

Why does his absence make so many feel so empty?

These are questions, and there are probably answers.

But I don’t think that’s the point.

Ultimately, the role of an object changes, and so does the space. And we end up with something completely different than what we, allegedly, started out with.

Eventually, hopefully,

we decide that it’s possible to redirect the upward growth back down towards the roots,

building something new there, beginning a new cycle.

Personally, holding on to something simply because it was once, allegedly, something else,

only ends up stressing me out, until I am forced to stop confusing the object itself

with the knowledge it embodies.

—To everyone out there transforming the space, tom or no tom,

and everyone watching them do it.

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[1] Remember: print your readings with the Adobe PDF viewer in booklet format to save time and trees.