city with no children // arcade fire
there were never very many kids in my neighborhood.
there was the girl who lived down the street. the first friend i made in a new town and the first one i lost in a new town before they moved out of the neighborhood. we used to listen to the beatles on the bus together and ride our bikes around the neighborhood. in fifth grade, we’d even tried to write a book together about what it would be like to be in middle school. her way of telling me we weren’t friends anymore was to write about it and let me read it in our book. i threw every single handcrafted page in the trash.
there was the family next door who had a three year old little girl. i used to watch her learn how to ride a bike while her dad trailed behind her on the sidewalk and in the car-crowded street. one day, her mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway anymore and she was gone, too. the next day, her dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway anymore either.
there was the five year old girl across the street with a baby brother i taught how to fist-bump. i watched them as their parents finally got married and the baby brother learned to walk and she was starting elementary school. i remember watching their dad pull out of the driveway one night, and his tires never touched it again. the mom used to sit outside the garage and smoke at night, and i watched as the garage became emptier and emptier until there wasn’t even a car parked out front.
there was family who moved in a little later was a daughter that was closer to my age and her two younger brothers, one five and another just one. i used go over to their house across the street all the time, watching as the four year old collected rocks and bugs and as the baby learned to walk and talk, and we found out their cousins did theatre with me and my brother. we never saw each other very much before the whole family moved to georgia for their dad’s work.
there was the kid who lived behind us who was in my brother’s grade. before we had a fence that divided our two yards, my brother used to walk through the backyards and spent the nigh. and sometimes the three of us would walk around the neighborhood and look for cool rocks until he stopped talking to my brother. i don’t know if he still lives behind us or not, and neither i nor my brother have tried to find out.
everyone around me could recall suburban nights when they were kids, stories of riding bikes around their big spaceous neighborhoods or hanging out at each other’s houses when they were younger. even as we all got older, they could reminisce about being little kids in suburbia and get that little kid glint in their eye with that little kid smirk.
i never had the big spaceous neighborhoods. i never had the little kid glint or the little kid smirk or the little kid friends that never moved away and took my blooming blossoms of suburbia with them.
