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I lived one town over from Paterson and went to school down the road from that reportedly scary-as-hell place. Driving in Kilikina, my first car, a silver 2001 Toyota Corolla with manual locks and a body like a tunafish can, I was given permission by my dad and every cop I ever met to run red lights, with caution, if it was after dark. TomTom was notorious for routing directions through the cities heart. Down Market St., it was the most direct. Mom would always hand me a MapQuest print-out with an alternate route as a back-up, just in case.

To think of Paterson, there was no beauty in it. Nothing lovely. It was a place to be avoided at all cost. It was where Ryan Denozia got mugged and punched in the eyes on his hunt for some drugs, the bluish-purple sacks swollen for days. It was the reason I prayed extra hard before going to sleep after hearing Daddy say he was going to visit School №6. I heard gunshots over and over in my dreams that night and worried all day I would get home from school and he wouldn’t be there.

Paterson was danger. There was no beauty in it.

Even the Lou Costello memorial. A squat statue of my favorite funny film man. The tie was too short for the statue, just like the real Lou wore it, and I was so happy to see it but then shocked to learn that Costello was born and raised in Paterson, NJ. Of all places, I thought. And then Ma would take us sometimes for drives around Bergen and Passaic Counties, and she would tell us stories like the time Grandma and her sister threw a bra on Frank Sinatra’s lawn, or where Janet Fonarucci stepped on her brand new white sneakers, where the best places to buy fresh bread were and she’d tell us sometimes about Paterson. The broken glass of old factory windows, the soot-caked brick, the shedding paint on their side. This was a factory town, she told us. This was a city center. It wasn’t always like this.

But we couldn’t believe it, couldn’t picture anything other than the leaning, tilting three-story homes, siding peeling from their faces, windows drooping, sinking with the heaviness of age and poverty. They were so close to one another, I used to think they were helping each other just to stay standing, but then one would catch on fire and take the rest down with it. We couldn’t imagine a Paterson that wasn’t half-empty, wounded and gaping. But the way she talked about it sometimes…as if it there had been some beauty.

Where was the beauty in the steely stained, orange flickering street lights, and the uneven sidewalks and the grass that grew like pubes on those rare patches of land under the overpass in a concrete ghost town? I couldn’t see it, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how many books I read or movies I saw that tried to pull some poetry from the place like Junot Diazs’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or the film “Paterson”.

Dawson was Paterson personified to me. All drugs and ginny-tees and split teeth, a skinhead. But he carried with him poetry, always. He was the factory buildings of broken glass. His letters came crisp and sealed on a weekly basis, sentences in neat and slanted script. If the stationary header hadn’t said Transformation Life Center, no sense in thinking he was sending it from a rehab. Time and grief blur the lines of those letters in my memory, but they’re still stacked neatly in the hard-to-reach shelf of my closet.

Ma was the first one to tell me about him. At a benefit dinner she sat next to him, a representative of the program and proof of its efficacy and efficiency. He’d been there just a couple of months, but ask anyone at that table, he was a young man transformed. And when Ma spoke of him, it was like Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai. Her face gleamed with the reflection of a light that he imbued wherever he went. It seemed to generate from his cells, left everyone he came into contact with impressed. Such a fine young man. So it was easy for her to pass a napkin with her daughters email and watch the boy representing a drug rehab slip it into his pocket. He writes poetry, she told me.

I’m walking across the parking lot of William Paterson University a month later, coming from a class I don’t want to be in when my orange Blackberry vibrates in my hand. And there’s Dawson, with a poem. I smile. When he writes to me, he’s there with me. It always feels like that. Dawson is all intimacy. The sweet and sweaty, messy-hair, whispering kind. He’s always pressing in but he uses his words instead of his body. And that scares me. He wants to know too much, and I’m not ready to trust the boy in rehab, even if I am falling in love with the boy Dawson. He holds me close with his words, though, each letter a tiny link intentionally placed. He asked me once what my favorite book was so he could read it. Told me that he wanted to know the things I love so he could know me, so he could love them too, so he could love me. It was stuff like that. It was always poetry coming out of him, and the poetry kept me close.

He’d show up on a Sunday sometimes with Jim, his sponsor, walking across the rows of modern church “pew” chairs, wearing a plaid snap button down from Kohl’s and grinning almost comically — it made you wonder how one person could smile so much, the dimple in his left cheek showing itself as he did. He didn’t even have facial hair yet but I would turn bright red anyway, unable to look him in the eye until we were alone in the hallway or in the corner of the coffee bar, and even then I wasn’t sure. Sometimes I would forget why he was here. I’d forget about the prison cell one benevolent woman found him in when he was facing 4–6 years, and the realities of the rehab center she set him up in. On the Sundays when he visited, I’d steal glimpses of him and the arms that were countlessly jabbed with drug-festering needles and I couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t picture a red-rimmed, low-lidded, glassy-eyed Dawson while he sat across the table from me beaming like a five-year-old boy at his birthday party. But then once in a taxi in NYC traffic, while pressed against the door I watched Dawson transform from benevolent life-poet to raging anxious and that put the fear of God in me. So though I walked arm in arm with his visiting Grandma through the Museum of Natural History that day, I hardly looked at him.

Still, somehow a few weeks later, I paced beneath one of the decades old maple trees that fence in Packanack Lake, entertaining Dawson case for us with his patent eagerness. His release date had been set for the second week of spring. He wanted us to be together then. Mostly silent as I listened, in the end I only said two words, Ask Jim, pretty certain that his sponsor would tell him what I couldn’t bring myself to say. That it was a bad idea, that he needed to get acclimated to a sober lifestyle on the outside first before anything else. But the following Sunday while sitting the under the coffee bar, he looked bashfully down at his hands.

Jim said some things, he said.

What kind of things? I asked, feeling his wall go up and suddenly realizing I didn’t want it to.

He told me, Dawson breathed and turned his face to me, that I- I shouldn’t trust you, that you don’t know how to be… how to be close to someone. He said you pretend you’re in relationships, when you’re not.

I leaned back against the shiplap wall, confused, because I said those things while sitting on the edge of Gina’s bed a few weeks before. Gina, Jim’s daughter. Over the past few months since meeting Dawson, Gina had heard every detail, every complaint, ever worry twice over. She knew Dawson, too, slept in the room next to him when he came to visit, ate breakfast with him, rode in the car with him to church on Sundays. How had I missed this?

…Gina’s mother, Stacy, a fat woman with bulging eyes and a smile that said “I’m happy now but cross me and I won’t be” intercepting me in the aisle on my way to say hi to Dawson and Jim, redirecting the conversation over to Gina, emphasizing an inside-joke she and Dawson shared while our families ate dinner together…

I watched Gina through the glass, talking in the hallway. Her cropped blonde hair swishing like a fan when she shook her head, her bright blue eyes lighting up with laughter, her petite ballerina’s body catching glances from the men around her.

I looked at Dawson. His white Hanes undershirt crumpled beneath the button down, and the buzzcut hair growing through like a ChiaPet, straight and plenty. His nails untrimmed, dirt caked beneath his fingernails from labor at at that backwoods rehab in upstate NY. He wasn’t anything I understood, nothing like home. He was Paterson. Scary, half empty, the route I avoided.

There’s a highway, Route 208, that runs alongside of Paterson, missing it by mere miles. It sits on the edge and watches, sometimes mocks. I’d driven up and down that highway countless times between Paramus and Hawthorne, to the Garden State Plaza and bougie Ridgewood in the 3 years since getting my license. But now the drive was feeling foreign and awful, with memories hanging over the median and scattered alongside the shoulder, bringing me face to face with my own prejudice, but unable to look past it.

I asked him, Does what Jim said matter to you?

He turned. No dimples, but earnest, he shook his head.

No.

In the Fall and Winter, Paterson Great Falls National Historic Park, where Passaic Falls drops into the Passaic River, is covered in ashy brown weeds and a perpetual wetness that’s neither dewy nor life-giving but cold and damp, and surrounded by matchstick trees with brittle branches that hang like geriatrics over the waterside. Jagged rocks and wayward concrete push through the national reserve landscape that’s been neglected. And in the summer and spring, it’s tainted by soot and dirt and frayed bits of garbage along the curbs, and still the grass is psoriasis, spreading like a rash in places it doesn’t belong and receding in places it does, dry and sparse. A place like Paterson needs constant maintenance if it’s ever going to be the thriving city it once was. It needs to prove itself and wash out the taint of decades. Even if Passaic Falls in the middle of a ghetto is poetry, what kind is it – the heart aching or the heart healing kind?

I scrawled my own poetry on a torn piece of notebook for him, asking him to wait until there was a little more root, a little more more proof of transformation.

WHEN the leaves are green,
when the bark is rough, 
worn, and proved to be enduring-
when the soil is rich with a steady flow, 
ensuring the tree is maturing-
take hold of the gold left within your heart
its prongs will surely tell-
with certainty if we were meant to be
if together our hearts fair well.

Three weeks later, he took Gina on a date horseback riding while I sat on a scratchy machine-produced hotel couch in Orlando. And while Ma made sandwiches on White Mountain bread with turkey and mayo and filled bags of pretzels, Pringles and chocolate chip cookies to have in the Disney parks, I zoomed in on the Facebook photo proof, at his dimples and her blonde hair fanning out on the horse mid-gallop.

Are you dating Gina? I texted.

Yes. That was all.

Everything that happens from here I watched from the sidelines, heard from friends, or surreptitiously discovered on social media.

Dawson was released from Transformation Life Center and took a job at a pest control company diving head first into a recovered lifestyle. We never spoke again.

Eight months later he and Gina were married. I was not invited to the wedding.

Nine months after that, they had a baby. I was not invited to the baby shower, but I did congratulate Gina in person at church one morning, and attempted to smooth what had become a severely fractured friendship. She looked so small and frightened when I spoke to her, I couldn’t help but wonder what vicious lies had been spoken about me, or if any guilt sat heavy on her conscious. I felt sure I had been painted a judgemental, loveless bot for denying Dawson’s affections. Even my therapist had been convinced I was afraid to admit I was in love with him while I held my feelings in reserve. But I did love him, I did. I so wanted to see him grow. Instead, I watched from afar as he deteriorated.

One year later they moved to Arizona with Gina’s parents. Dawson started his own pest control business. They had another baby. I heard his descent back into drug use was slow, while babies were still being born. The family, the business, the rebuilding, and life took its toll. And who knows what coping mechanisms had taken root in him, if any, or if they had been left like seedlings?

Five years later, they separated.

Seven years later Dawson shot himself in the head. He hadn’t meant to, not really. Living with another woman, he was playing a game. An I’ll-shoot-myself-in-the-head-if-you-don’t-listen-to-me-love-me-care-about-me game. And he lost.

To think of Paterson, NJ, there was no beauty in it. But every so often, men and women invest their money into Paterson with visions of what it could be, in recollection of what it had been, but no one really has been willing to give Paterson what it needs to transform: time and relationship. Too often, all that seems to matter to the do-gooders is the do-gooding and how it might make them look, or the tax breaks it will give them. If they stopped and looked closely, they might see that despite their best intentions, they don’t really care about Paterson at all.