pack your bag and let’s go.
And is it old school, baby, to still feel stuff?
Just a memory, then suddenly
Tears come rolling down, babe, don’t worry
- Fink, Not Everything Was Better In The Past
There’s a certain loneliness that comes with living in suburbia. I can’t describe it. It punctures your soul; it seems to define you for a while too long. It turns a smile into something too painfully brilliant to look at. It’s romantic, and it’s painful, and every time you get close to escape it catches up with you, almost instantaneously. It is utterly confused as to why you were running in the first place. You’re inside and you hate yourself for continuing to breathe; outside, it’s a perfect day. Outside, a child laughs, a dog barks, a squirrel sprints across backyard posts, someone’s car won’t stop going off, the sky is blue, the clouds are white. Your heart hurts in your chest. You hate the music and your skin. Like I said, it isn’t something that makes sense. Maybe it does if you’ve experienced it before. I think the only solace comes in the evening, when most all is quiet and dark hallways serve to soothe the strangely chipped plane of your body.
But let’s romanticize it anyway. Let’s do it, anyway. Because why not? Why not turn this beautiful-ugly dream thing into something that resonates in a way that is lighter, easier, more achingly? Take me to the old fields and let’s pick weeds and call them flowers and tuck them behind each other’s ears. Take me down to the pond and let’s race back up the hill, let’s cool down under the trees with pine cone-bruised feet. Take me to your house, where I’ve never been and will never go, to drink lemonade when the afternoon sun gets too intense. Let’s be children again at the end of our senior year and mourn all that we are about to lose and laugh about that time when and remember all our good days and promise to make some more.
Let’s run on the track behind our old high school, red clay staining the soles of our shoes, crunching as we push ourselves.
Let’s fall back against the warm ground and spill cold water over our mouths.
Let’s pretend the sun makes us happy, and this is nostalgia thumping in our chests, not sadness.
(But maybe, in this context, those two are the same thing. Perhaps what I should say is, not pain, and hatred.)
I feel like I’m never actually laughing anymore. It’s always in the middle of a loud long laugh that I realize how easy it has become for me keep the sound real.
When I imagine it, I imagine hitting a wall. I picture it like my greatest fear. I have all this, you see, so the obvious next step is this house, this school, this place with the cul-de-sacs and identical maple leaf trees lined up on every road, one after the next, block block block, like someone has transformed child’s play into a livable habitat. Cheap, efficient, profitable. I hate the nitty gritty of it. It makes me squirm, it pokes at the scream stuck in my throat.
All the same, it’s where I made all my friends, where I was once happiest, where I could go one street down to the plaza in the summer and buy whatever for my latest failed recipe. This is where I have staked out my own little sense of belonging for the first eighteen years of my life. I don’t want that to mean nothing, and it doesn’t. Maybe if I leave and never come back, I’ll miss everything from before. I will eat my words and I will turn this place into a dream, a glimmer of the ideal that I had grasped for an instant before it slipped through my fingers.
What’s talking, now? Paranoia, hypocrisy, or the system that’s wound its way through me?
I believe, undoubtedly, that’s the hardest part.
