It’s looming ahead of her now, the New York apartment, like a fearful destination, a room filled with grotesque possibility. Yet, it’s beautiful, in its own way. Four walls that belong, completely, to her. Brooklyn is so loud outside her window; she often looks out and wonders what she’s doing there. She’s not of the city—she’s always been a suburban girl, halfway between adventure and a dead end.
The truth is, she doesn’t want to go back there, to the New York apartment, to that foreign place. To live with strangers who she needs to pretend to be ok around. What would they think if they knew the true mess of her?
Maybe she doesn’t feel comfortable living anywhere anymore. Maybe there is no home for someone like her. She has always been a suburban girl, halfway between something slow and something fast, always moving back and forth between one extreme and another, floating along the interstate that connects unlikely paths. Maybe if she wanders long enough, she’ll make it to wherever she’s going. But for now, all she has is the New York apartment.
Did she think it would make her more interesting? Paying this unreasonable rent, shoving her SUV into places it cannot fit, working publishing jobs that she hates? Did she think escaping into that brownstone would allow her to escape herself? That she would suddenly become someone who does not need to lean on another person to feel safe? Did she think the New York apartment would make her tough?
But she’s still a suburban girl when she looks in the tiny mirror of her bathroom, when she feels the old floors and walls shake around her. She’s still that girl who craves the comforts and security of a home. A suburban girl, pretending to be a girl she is not.
But what’s a suburban girl to do when suburbia isn’t home anymore? When her family is spread out like a withering tree, branches sloping downward? When she drives along the backroads of her hometown and realizes that, perhaps, suburbia was never home at all, but just some other strange place she tried so desperately to blend into?
Maybe it’s just her destiny to always be a suburban girl, halfway between happiness and fear, longing and destruction, roaming the Earth forever, in search of a home.
There are always times in our life where we feel a little displaced. Well expressed.
I feel that home is in our relationships. Home is in a long firm hug from a good friend on a bad day or making eye contact with someone who knows you so well that they know exactly what you’re trying to convey with just a glance. Home is a feeling not necessarily a place.
Places or buildings are not a home. Home is where the heart is and who you’re with.
“No one belongs anywhere, no one exists on purpose, we’re all gonna die.” -Some TV show
To be honest, I’ve felt similarly living just about anywhere. Isolated and out of place. Sometimes a part of me seems to half-expect an official correspondence apologetically explaining that there’s been a terrible mistake, I’m in the wrong universe, and could I please make arrangements to relocate to Dimension J-527 by next week.
But perhaps we are not as alone as we suppose. I like your writing.
To a suburban girl, I pray a home finds you in the place that you build, one big enough to position all of your thoughts, hopes and desires all in one. But if anything, maybe you’ve always been falling out of the nest, gliding from tree to tree until you can take flight and build your own nest. So keep traveling, keep writing, and your way will pave