A Thousand-or-So Words on Suburbia
words by Chloe Hofrichter, photos by Brook Mckeon
☆
It’s August, and the day is warm — our coastal town’s excuse for winter. Wind that is benign and slightly balmy, the sort of temperature that reminds me of a bath after I’ve sat in it long enough to listen to a few songs in a row, or read a chapter or two; room temperature but turned up a notch. The sun is kissing my skin, soft but persistent. I need it. My arms and legs look as if they’ve faded in the wash and my face is an eyesore; splotchy red and white and pimpled. I need ocean, to be swallowed up in that crisp, briny mass of untameable nature, to bury my fingers into the sand — the way you might grip onto a lamp post in a tornado — and hold my breath as the waves roll over me. It’s been a while.
My friend — a new friend — told me the other night that being here, living here, with these people and these surroundings, has made her the happiest she’s ever been in all of her fifteen years. I don’t remember having ever been as happy as I am now, she said. It made me wonder why it couldn’t be enough for me. It made me feel guilty, ungracious. It is beautiful here. I have an ocean — many oceans — separated by lush headlands that I have climbed a thousand times over, thick with trees and birdlife and signs that warn tourists about falling rocks. Turquoise water that stretches as far as the eye can see and curves slightly on the horizon, making me feel like I’m in a dome — like if the planes I’ve been in had soared a little higher I’d be able to see the thick glass that separates me from the rest of the world, the lustre and transparency of it.
Yes, it’s a dome. But it’s a safe dome, with my library a ten minute walk away, my mother and my brother and each of my closest friends with their bright, kind eyes, ready to bitch to me about their parents or someone in their math class, the boy they’re kissing or the lack thereof. The primary school I used to go to; I drive past it every day. I see the kids in their royal blue-and-white striped collared shirts, like tiny uniformed inmates let out for their weekly good-behaviour walk. I know all of the bus lines like the back of my hand, just like I know that every morning when I journey to my bus stop, I will see the polite blonde woman walking her pudgy black staffie. His name is Ollie, just like my dog. She will say good morning to me and I will say good morning back and I will cringe, perhaps because of the awkwardness of having nothing else to talk about, or the way my voice squeaks when we exchange pleasantries every time without fail.
But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? The familiarity of it all, the comfort of knowing in your heart of hearts that nothing in your life is subject to change unless you make it so yourself. The way that I could power walk inland for twelve minutes and then stop, and the house I will have stopped in front of will look more or less exactly like the one I just came from. The people who live behind the sunset bricks are just like me, just like my family, just like all the people I go to school with, except maybe worse-off or maybe better. Working class. Tired. Their reward for living is an annual holiday, despite the fact that their home is a holiday destination itself, somewhere people go to visit theme parks and get a tan. It doesn’t matter. Fiji, Bali, Vanuatu — getting a hundred tiny braids and small white flowers painted on your fingernails for a pittance — it’s a pleasant escape, the hard-earned freedom of the hard-working. To me it seems endlessly depressing, a constant cycle in which no one ever experiences anything new or even slightly cognitively enriching.
I am trying. I am trying so very hard to fall in love with the suburb I grew up in,
soak up the intricate splendours of the day to day, the nuances that might make a tourist excited.
Sometimes, I take walks just before dusk, when the air is fresh and the neighbourhood is laden with the sort of warm, yellowed golden that only appears while the world is gathering darkness. I pass runners, women with prams and frown lines, primary school children on mountain bikes. I listen to music, podcasts, recordings of people reciting poetry about love, poetry that I wish I’d written. The flora I pass is limited and simple, either visibly native or some sort of pretty, bittersweet weed that would make my mother tut. The fauna is reduced to domestic animals — black cats whose paths I avoid and lapdogs that give me hives when they lick my shins. I drink them in. I drink it all in. I watch the sun set, watch the orange light that hits the trees that are visible from my bedroom window weaken and then fade entirely, day in, day out. I behold the stars and the deep indigo sky and the ashen moon that waxes and wanes, the way it replaces the absconding sun in the sky and steals the time of day I love so profoundly.
