stuck in the suburbs

Day one of spring break:

Wake up at 6:30. Shower. Get dressed. Eat breakfast. Take Candace to school. Go to the library and read. Get home and take a nap. Read some more. Pick Candace up. Go to the store with my dad. Go back to the library (I do love that place). Take out Time Bandits, Natalie Merchant's Tiger Lily and Appalachia Waltz from the library. Watch said Terry Gilliam masterpiece with my family. Eat lots and lots of grapes.

Not quite the Girls Gone Wild experience the rest of my age group seems to desire, but I'm contented. I sat outside my high school this afternoon, car parked in the waiting line while Candace made her way through her tightly-clothed, cell phone-carrying, freshly-manicured cohort. As 17-year-old after 17-year-old drove past me in Acura after Audi after BMW after Mercedes after Volvo I was struck by an incredible sadness. These are the "privileged," the ones who will spend their college spring breaks (and most likely spent their high school February breaks) in Cancun, in the Bahamas, in Europe, nary a care, living the "good life," returning to cold New England a slight bit more tan, with a slight sneer at us ignorant and pokey small-town hicks.

If only. Perhaps it's simply the perspective of self-justification and rationalizing that compels me to feel sorry for these young suburbanites. They will never learn to feel (really feel), to think (really think), to adventure (really adventure), to read (really read), to live (really live). My years at Trumbull High School, though highly beneficial--and this most likely because I never was settled in anything, always reaching (for what?)--were often cumbersome and frustrating. One feels at times that one spends one's day with empty shells; by this I don't mean that people are dead, per se, but that they aren't really alive. These are not people who have nightmares for weeks after reading Orwell's 1984, these are not people who take 20 books out of the library after reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 just-in-case, these are not people who look for marlins every time they're fishing after reading Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, question EVERYTHING and its brother in an existential crisis after Rosencantz and Guildenstern are Dead's philosophical onslaught, or give up on a hard-fought-for faith for a little bit after reading Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley. These are not people who cry for hours after seeing a brilliant photo of the sun--the closest I'll ever get to that great ball of fire. This is not to say that my responses are the epitome, but they are, at least, responses. And to respond is proof that we are not empty shells. (Expect my thoughts on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World soon.)

I recently found a slip of paper on which some six years ago I'd scribbled the following words: there are some people who live and some who simply...exist.

Inquiring about a certain relationship, my mother asked if the other party found me too boisterous. Perhaps, I replied, but that is how I live, and it is the only way I know. There is great merit in withdrawing and thinking-really thinking, deeply thinking--but this crisis-plagued girl finds greater meaning and freedom in running amongst the stars. I'm not nearly enough, and I never will be, and I'm so tired and frustrated with letting myself be. I desperately long to break free of cages--both the ones I'm forced into and the ones I've made for myself, unwilling to accept any consolation but the real, willing only to gaze in perfect silence at the stars, the only impetus to keep running...

So I watch vapid adolescents make their way from day to mundane day--ticking clockwork ever haunting their steps, though they don't (can't? won't?) hear the echoes, and pray that I never find such satisfaction. Time is, indeed, a clock in a crocodile, chasing after all of us, and we are growing up--Neverland a well-phrased myth. And I cry a little bit for them, because they've let themselves be enough, big dreams only a facade disguising comfort, safety and package. Dream big, friends. Dream! Not the dreaming of privilege and wealth, of society's unbounded offerings. Further up and further in! Hope for the Shadowlands. You may end up right back where you are, but you'll have known the joy and pain of dreaming, and you'll have lived...

"See yourself in the mirror, you're separate from yourself. See the world in the mirror, you're separate from the world. I don't want that separation anymore (Joy Gresham)."

Here's a link to Natalie Merchant's San Andreas Fault, a song I've been letting repeat (and repeat and repeat) over the past couple of days. "San Andreas Fault moved its fingers through the ground, and the walls came tumbling down. O, promised land O, wicked ground. Build a dream, tear it down."




Thanks to Mary Shouvlin for the photos.