The Promise of Suburbia
I’m embarrassed to tell you all of this, but I can’t help it. I’ve just slept in my childhood bedroom.
By Danya Issawi
Published
This essay was originally published on Danya's substack, Mish Mashy, which you can subscribe to here.
Time is molasses on the tree-lined streets of Prairie Village. There is assuredly nowhere more pressing to be than in the exact spot you are. People stand in line at the pharmacy, the coffee shop, the grocery store without urgency, sometimes excruciatingly so. The roads wind, wide and gracious, around newly-built homes exploding from the constraints of their lots, with manicured lawns outstretched at their faces. The neighboring town keeps their golf-courses trimmed and green, and to this day the deeds to many of the surrounding houses, historic and obsolete as they may be, explicitly prohibit my kind (“Arabians”) from ownership. But, the bakery down the street just has the best chocolate chip cookies (everyone swears so) and, when I was a child, the moms nearly always asked nicely before they pet my curls. Here, the birds sing unceremoniously, nearly vacuously, throughout the day to apathetic ears who’ve never known the emptiness of their absence, uninhibited by the onslaught of sound that sometimes stifles them into silence where I live in New York City.
There was a time when all I could do was run from the soil where I grew — the suburbs that coddled me throughout childhood — and headfirst into a spot in line as a pick-me transplant (“I’m not like the other transplants!!! Promise!!!”). It’s easy to feign disdain for the town you came of age in — to jeer when you return for a weekend when you’re still 22 and grasping at some semblance of identity. Maybe even exceptionalism, and snidely note how nearly nothing has changed (was it supposed to in the six months since you left?). To feel the judgment well up toward those who will never leave eventually melt and reveal perhaps its true shape: jealousy.
You must convince yourself it’s all grotesque. At least, I have to. That it’s not intoxicating to sit behind the steering wheel of a car, one with the windows down and sticky summer air filtering in and rifling through my hair. That the silence that befalls the town at night feels isolating instead of peaceful. That my weekends, filled with the never-ending absence of the people I left behind, are never lonely. Who could ever be alone in a city like this? And mostly, that my parents have aged at the same rate as my hometown friends’ parents have: not in gargantuan leaps but in slow, untroubling ascension.
Sometimes, I find myself running errands that don’t exist, driving down streets aimlessly, in the opposite direction of where I need to be. I think I’m searching for something — maybe a place where I still exist. I go to Sonic and get nothing more than a cup of ice. I pass slowly by my old high school, and pause at the crest of the hill. I used to love the sky from here. I stare at the big dipper perched in the dark while opening our creaky front door. My father makes me dinner in the home I grew up in, and I gorge myself on the familiarity of it all. It’s been years and years since I left, but the house clings to the smell of rice as I lie in the same bed I did when I was five. I fall asleep thinking of New York.
When I drive through the fields just south, where the hills swell into one another and pods of cows graze just feet from the highway and, at noon, the clouds leave imprinted shadows on the grass below, I become irate. Is this what I’m running from? What if I could just want this? What if my brother had never moved to a coast other than my own and how dare he get older in my absence? Would it be so bad if I relinquished my brain to something a little more still? What is it that I’m even looking for? Out east? Out here? It’s mortifying to be crying on cruise control.
There’s a promise in suburbia, false of an idol as it may be. At least, one I’ve sold myself. Predictability is, for better or worse, enshrined in some unspoken code of ethics. The lights in the parking lot of the hair salon across the street turn on and off at the same time every day, and the first snowfall of the year nearly always lands on my birthday. Life, I’m convinced, is filled with a sense of ease here. The places you need to go never seem far and grief feels as though it happens elsewhere, even when it’s taking root in your own home. The price of sheer existence, exorbitant still, feels less boisterous than what New York City has to offer me. That better life? The one that seems to be slipping precariously away and out from under our feet, doesn’t it seem within reach here, in the place you were once young? A home of your own. A picket fence. A car or bus to take you where it is you need to go, quickly and quietly. A lawn, maybe even with room to run. Trees that rustle in the summer and turn brown in the fall, and cardinals that sing from their branches in the backyard.
Does the unending possibility and mystical unknown that coats our childhoods stay behind, trapped in the place we once felt it? Perhaps it’s the nostalgia that leaks from every pore in Prairie Village that haunts me whenever I return, or maybe it’s the fear that I’ll never have what it is my father bare-knuckled to build. In the suburbs, the promise of America is seemingly frozen in time — the hollow guarantees my parents were sold are still alive somewhere, ready for the taking, if only someone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps just hard enough.
