Hampshire: Common App Personal Statement (companion)

Nobody asked me to count the empty storefronts on Main Street, but by the summer I was sixteen I had counted them four times. ¹The first time was an accident. I was walking to the library, the only air-conditioned building that did not require buying something, and I noticed that the bakery had become a vape shop, the vape shop had become a phone repair stand, and the phone repair stand had become brown paper taped over glass. I started keeping a list in the notes app on a cracked phone. By the fourth count it was a spreadsheet, color-coded, with a column for how long each space had stayed dark. I am not sure when a habit becomes an obsession, or when an obsession becomes a project, but somewhere in there I had built an unofficial census of my dying downtown. ²I told myself I was just curious. That was half a lie. The other half was that the town was the only thing that had stayed still long enough for me to study, while everything in my house was moving. My parents separated the year the bakery closed, and for a while I lived out of two duffel bags that traveled between two apartments on alternating weeks. I learned which walls were thin and which radiators clanked and which neighbor left for work at exactly 6:40. ³I think I counted storefronts because I could not count on much else, and a spreadsheet does not change its mind about where you sleep. The order I could not find at home, I went out and imposed on the street. Eventually the data started asking questions back. Why did the spaces near the bus stop fill faster? Why did the landlord of the three longest vacancies own half the block? I walked into the regional library and asked a reference librarian how to find property records, and she walked me through the county assessor's site like it was the most natural request in the world. ⁴I made a map. I gave a five-minute version of it at a sleepy town council meeting, where three people clapped and one told me the bakery had closed because the owner retired, not because the town was failing, which complicated my tidy story and, I have decided, improved it. That is the part I keep returning to. I went looking for decline and found something messier: retirements, a landlord sitting on property as an investment, a bus route that quietly decided which corners lived. My spreadsheet could not hold all of that, so I am learning to hold it myself. ⁵I do not think I will fix my downtown. I have stopped believing that is the right verb. But I have started believing that paying close, stubborn, unsentimental attention to a place is itself a kind of care, and that the most useful thing I can offer is not a solution but a better question. ⁶I still keep the spreadsheet. There are two new entries since spring, and one space, a former florist, that has stayed stubbornly, gloriously occupied for fourteen months. I check on it the way some people check the weather. It is the closest thing I have to optimism, and I have learned to take optimism wherever it stays still long enough to be counted. ⁷