eyeodyssey | Waking Purgatory (Reply)

It should technically be a happy time right now, it’s a few days until Christmas and we’re unpacking for the new apartment, but I can’t really leave behind the underlying paranoia and distrust attached with our own physical means of shelter. Having two personal run-ins with gentrification driven evictions back to back in just a little over a year leaves me shaken. When we first moved to our 2017 apartment from a complex that was literally crumbling and being disconnected from the outside world by a passively abusive set of owners, we were surrounded by tenants who had lived there for years. Just by the time we finished unpacking, the team running the place started acting strange and tenants around us were leaving one by one, with whole sections of the grounds already being torn down. We asked them constantly if we had to move, they said no. They lied to our faces until the day that they walked to our front doorstep as mock trick or treaters, having us sign an agreement that we would be out of there by the end of the year. We experienced the same hell there again as we did back in our apartment before that one, with the ceiling caving in and biohazard people surrounding the grounds for a black mold infestation that our landlord tried to hide from us. And now, here we are again, at a new place with supposedly long-term tenants surrounding us and a landlord that we have no clue on the motives of. No matter what I’m told, I can’t help but constantly look back, expecting gentrification to catch back up with us and skin us alive again.

Merry Christmas.