Recently, I’ve seen a lot of suburbs hate. To a certain extent, I understand it. It’s the suburbs, it’s boring, poorly planned, and generally just a little too uniform. Whenever I think of the suburbs, I think of Camelot from A Wrinkle in Time, the image of conformity. I try to catch myself though, albeit many times unsuccessfully. For the sake of disclosure have always, and will always, identify as a New Yorker, but there is a certain lull that the suburbs contain that is almost inexplicable.
In the large expanse of the suburbs, I find myself at peace. In between cul-de-sacs and parking lots, there is a simple serenity in it. The landscape has a quiet obsolescence, it has settled into its own still routine. The only things you pass are SUVs from 2008 and, if you’re lucky, the occasional friendly jogger.
Whenever I visit my cousins (residents of a small suburb in Pennsylvania) I like to steal a bike and take it to their high school, where the lights in the football field never turn off. When I was younger, I would just pass by, I think, in all my city smarm, I would scoff at it; I traded football fields for skyscrapers and that was ok with me. Now, I like to sit in the bleachers. It’s comfortable, being small in a big space. People talk that way New York, but the truth is that New York is not all that big, it doesn’t allow you to be big. People describe the suburbs as suffocating, but the truth is, it is the most free I’ve ever felt. In New York, you get the feeling that you are just as small as everyone else, but among the lights and the cicadas I am the smallest thing. I am the only thing. When I lie there, I imagine the light post as God, I think of it as not being able to see me; or if it does, as a subject, the way I look at ants when I see them swarm a bagel, in awe of their gratitude over something so simplistic. New York Public Schools do not come with homecoming or football games or school pride. I used to think I was above all of that, I told myself I was above all of that, at least, because it made it feel ok for me.
In an ironic way, I find New York quite suffocating. There is, simultaneously, a deeply intoxicating, but deeply suffocating feeling of ambition within every, not just New Yorker, but person who comes to New York. As much as it is my impulse to shit on NYU kids (because they deserve it) they come to New York with the understanding that New York is a place to conquer, which, personally, I don’t think is the right mindset, but it does convey a certain level of ambition.
New York leaves little to aspire to. I was raised in the place that people come to, so the thought of leaving feels both wrong and necessary. No matter how much I assure my family that I want to leave the city for college, they look at me funny and tell me that I don’t know what I have; which may be true, but it’s almost dystopic the way people try to keep you trapped here, telling you that nothing is the same “out there” and repeating that New York has everything, while every other inch of the United States is just cornfields and Levittown remakes.
For the sake of transparency, this piece should not be taken as a critical endorsement of the suburbs, but rather a praise of what the suburbs represent. My mother’s parents came to America to seek out the suburban lifestyle, to live in the suburbs; to be a nuclear family was the dream, it meant you succeeded. This mindset was inherited by my mother and eventually me, who still attempts to square getting a humanities degree with my mother insistently asking about how I plan on retiring. I know that there are people who decide to fight the humanities fight, to prove its worth something, in all honesty though, I don’t really care. Humanities doesn’t pay like STEM, I know that, and, in my heart, if the humanities degree I get could afford me the suburbs, that feels like winning. This coupled with the fact that, for many queer people, including myself, the nuclear family represents not only success in the form of assimilation. I know there are queer people, again, including myself, that scream for liberation, but I think that, at the end of the day, most queer people would choose to be ok, or, rather, I tell myself that to make me feel better.
More and more the conclusions I come to are “I want to feel ok,” truthfully it’s more of a question for my therapist, or a philosopher. Why does anyone want to feel ok? Is it because we don’t like pain or that we love feeling good? How do we prove that?
I don’t have an answer for either question, frankly, I don’t know why I bring it up, but, recently, I burned my hand on a hot pan, and after I cooled it down and placed it on an icepack, I didn’t tell anyone. Not my mother, not my friends, I just lay with it for a couple days until it healed over enough to become unnoticeable and it was mine. The suburbs are lonely enough for things to be yours. In the city, every utility, every store, every crevice of every park is shared, and there is no shortage of influencers capitalizing off of “hidden gems.” No one is doing that in the suburbs, things that are hidden stay hidden. Some people might see that as symptomatic of a dark secrecy in the suburbs, but, in my experience, people in the suburbs are more likely to be conspiratorial about the world around them than they are to be conspirers themselves. What does this have to do with being ok? I’m not sure, but in having that burn be my burn, it made itself better. In the city, once something is revealed it is swarmed and fawned over until the attention is intoxicating enough to force you to want more. It is hard to keep things to yourself when you are constantly fighting to be the most interesting person. My cousins do not know their neighbors beyond the occasional "Happy Holidays,” and nothing more is needed. Who their neighbors are doesn’t matter. In New York, everyone seems to matter. And it kills you, it really does.