TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK (Michael Mohr's Fictional NYC Covid Memoir)

Chapter 6 (PAID)

Photo by Mike C. Valdivia on Unsplash

Chapter 6

I had moved apartments. I was still unsure about how long I’d stay in New York City—or if I’d stay longer term—but I knew I wasn’t yet ready to leave now. After tireless hours of searching the AirBnB website, I’d scored a small room in a four-room 4^th floor walkup across town on the west side, and way further north, in Hamilton Heights (upper West Harlem), at 147^th and Broadway. I could walk a block-and-a-half south to 145^th Street to catch the 1-train into downtown Manhattan.

The apartment was rented out and run by a Kenyan woman in her mid-forties who had a five-year-old daughter, Almasi. The woman’s name was Makena. She’d come to the States when she was just eighteen, fleeing the poverty and lack of opportunities of her small hometown village. She’d married soon after, had a baby…