Author: Madison Cox

so we all wrote about the songs we can’t live without back in like august, right? and i did that list about my top ten all-time Favorite Songs, right?

well, i changed my mind.

my music taste changes a lot, what can you do?

but these songs make me feel the same as i did the moment i first heard them. they also make me cry sometimes, so maybe there’s some strange correlation between my favorite songs and whether or not i’ve cried while listening to them. anyway, here’s a Revised conclusive list of my top five, end-all-be-all favorite songs in the known and unknown universe (plus some neat lil explanations if that’s something you’re into).

secret for the mad / dodie (music video link) – this song is simple, but it is truly one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever heard in my life. this song is one that i turn to when my days are more down than up, and i just need to remember that the up is coming soon. favorite lyrics: 

sprawl II (mountains beyond mountains) / arcade fire – see this is where the new stuff comes in because when i first made my favorite songs list, i’d never heard this song before. everything about this song is stunning (and the music video is mesmerizing), but i think the best part is how much of myself i can hear and see and feel in this song. favorite lyrics: 

hey jude / the beatles – i’ve grown up listening to the beatles, so it only seems fair that i have a beatles song somewhere on this list, and while there are plenty of other beatles songs that i love dearly, this one always sticks around. i still have a video of this song on my laptop from when i saw paul mccartney in concert in 2013, and i have a lot of other nice memories tied to this song, so maybe that’s my soft spot. favorite lyrics: 

starlight / muse (live version that makes me Cry) – i’ve adored this song for as long as i’ve listened to muse, but my love for it didn’t quite cement until i was listening to a live concert performance and casually started crying in the middle of a target. i spent a really long time thinking i’d never hear this song live, and trust me, when i finally did, i sobbed the entire time. favorite lyrics:

i wanna get better / bleachers  (music video but watch the other one first)– this song, without a doubt or hesitation, is my favorite song of all time. from the moment a first heard the words “i wanna get better” in july 2015, i knew this song (and this band) would change my life in ways i could never have even fathomed before, and it continues to change my life every day since. all i want is to hear this song live, and who knows? that day could be sooner than i think. favorite lyrics:

with the way i listen to music, favorite songs are always subject to change. everything shifts around with every new song i discover, and even with every old song i rediscover. but these five, these are sticking around for a long time.

now, we have the phases of high school’s past.

9th grade was relatively harmless. i’d say it was a mix of the tail-end of my emo phase that gradually morphed into that tumblr-esqe, black grid patten skirt and choker number that was 2015 in a nutshell; the only difference was now twenty one pilots and halsey and bleachers got thrown into the shuffle. sorta weird and confusing, but still harmless (i also met dan and phil the summer after freshman year because unlike most people who started watching them when they were 13, i didn’t stop watching them and start hating on them and their fanbase). this year was pretty boring, but i wasn’t nearly as melancholic and miserable as i was in 8th grade, so i guess it’s an improvement.

but i think 10th grade is when i truly came into my element. the summer before, i went from a good four years of wearing the stereotypical nerd glasses and found my way to these beautiful horn-rimmed ray bans yall may recognize from my actual face. oh, and those bands i hated in middle school? LOVE them. this was the year i truly indulged in thrift store sweaters and photography and writing and every other association that typically comes with coffeeshop hipsters. granted, this stuff existed in my life in some form or facet before they truly became my hipster tendencies (for the record, i was all about space before that galaxy trend in 2013), but now they’d all accumulated into this mass of pretension. i’d also made a spotify account, which meant my taste in music was finally expanding beyond the emo remnants of middle school. mentally, it was a bit uppy-downy, but i was doin’ pretty okay.

and now we’re reached 11th grade. the style aesthetic of sweaters and other comfortable, typically warm clothing has stuck around, but now i have jeans with holes in them and i’ve made my way back around to black jeans which is fun i guess. i need to get new glasses, but i’m most likely gonna stick with similar frames. i still love bands like fall out boy and panic! at the disco and muse and all the other bands i discovered throughout middle school, but i’ve also come to embrace the softer, more obscure side of alternative (aka, i started listening to indie folk). i’ve fallen in love with bands like ok go and arcade fire and bright eyes, as well as artists like st. vincent and tom rosenthal. it’s definitely a shift from the music library on my old iphone 4.

phases are weird. the person i was just four years ago and the person i am today are two very different people, but some of our edges still line up. i still love doctor who and sherlock, i still love dan and phil, i still hold on to fall out boy and panic! at the disco, i still hold on to those formative obsessions of my youth. they made me who i am, and though i may cringe at them sometimes, i’m still grateful for the person they’ve helped me become. the things we love help up grow, even if we only love them for a little while.

but at least i never had a horse phase.

so i’ve had my fair share of phases in my life, as i assume we all have. i’m sure everyone had that weird random phase from 4th to 6th grade (somewhere around that window). i went through a period of really hating justin bieber and one direction. i had a big thing for american girl magazines and making stuff out of duct tape for a little while. really had a thing for zebra print at some point in time? also: there was a pretty big window where i was obsessed with charles schulz’s peanuts cartoons, particularly snoopy and woodstock (the snoopy shirts infect my closet to this day).

my phases have been… questionable, to say the least.

but where my phases really kick it into first gear is middle school.

see, 6th grade was pretty innocent. i was hangin’ out, doin’ my thing, just bein’ a weird 11-year-old on the tail-end of her snoopy-&-woodstock days. i really loved the beatles (the only positive residue from 4th grade), still wore clothes from justice, and thought i was très cool with my new side bangs AND glasses AND pierced ears. this was also the point at which i was introduced to a little sci-fi show called doctor who by my gifted teacher and quickly fell in love. it was absolutely disgusting, but mostly harmless.

then we get to 7th grade. this is where things really go downhill. see, this is the year i became simultaneously obsessed with sherlock, which was already a mistake (however, i still love this show and watch it with my dad so any poking fun at it and we’re gonna tussle). this was also the time i discovered panic! at the disco, dan and phil, and some other stuff that i’m most likely repressing. i was also introduced to some band called fall out boy by one of my friends i had art class with, and yall already know where this is going.

the summer before 8th grade (and just the rest of 8th grade) was full of bad decisions – GO TO JAIL GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL DO NOT PASS GO DO NOT COLLECT $200 GO TO JAIL decisions. but somehow, i pulled through. and fell straight into black skinny jeans. this was when my chemical romance and muse became staples in my itunes library, along with the bands discovered the previous school year, and also when i generally just said really dumb things to people because i was in such a terrible mental state that i couldn’t register how to be a not-stupid human being. however, about halfway through 8th grade, i had a Transformation. i went from emo, black-sweater wearing, hipster-despising weirdo to pastel, flower-crown wearing, sweater-loving weirdo. i mean, the weirdo part stuck around because i was genuinely just WEIRD in middle school, but it was definitely a 180. this was also about the time i first started talking to my best friend, and god bless her for sticking around after that atrocity.

i used to pride myself on being “not like other girls” (barf), being one of those ~edgy~ alternative kids. i refused to listen to bands like arctic monkeys or the 1975 (lol). i thought the perks of being a wildflower was the most pompous, contrived movie/book franchise i’d ever heard of in my life. come 8th grade, however, i was laying in my bed with tears ROLLING down my face as i held a torrent of the movie on my phone screen, singing in between sobs WE CAN BE HEROES *sniff* JUST FOR ONE DAY *cough*. 8th grade was a hot mess and a half, but it spurred the transition from disgusting emo kid to disgusting pretentious hipster.

and with the end of that, we have high school. that’s a wild ride for another time.

culture war // arcade fire

and so we have the final part of the suburbs (finally).

when i first started writing this series, i don’t think i realized how introspective i would have to be to write it, and i definitely don’t think i realized that it would turn into something completely different from my original intentions. now, i’m not entirely sure what my original intentions were, but they certainly weren’t ending up admitting that getting away from home isn’t always what you want it to be.

now, don’t get me wrong; i love msa a whole whole lot, but it’s not the home i wanted it to be. it’s a new place i have to find myself in, and that’s okay.

as a writer, the feelings of home and belonging have always been topics that i’ve wanted to write about. i love the idea of home being something that you have to feel rather than a place that you live in, and i’m sure that doesn’t go unnoticed in some of my pieces. at the same time, i’m also an innately nostalgic human being, and i write about that a lot as well. i love reminiscence and memories, and i love the writing that can come out of remembering.

the idea of suburbia being a feeling like home is to me came from when i first had the idea to write this series. i had just downloaded arcade fire’s entire discography, and i fell in love with “sprawl II”(i don’t think there was a single day in september i didn’t listen to that song AT LEAST twice). so i started to write a blog about it, and the idea for this series came to be.

if you haven’t noticed, each part of this series is paired with a song (or two). each part of this series is based in chronological order on arcade fire’s album, the suburbs. i tried writing for “sprawl II” and didn’t get very far, but i knew i still wanted to work on this idea of my life in a suburban small town. then i remembered this little song called “suburbia” by troye sivan (yes claire i listen to troye), and i knew what i wanted to do. i knew i wanted to capture the distinctions i have between living in the suburbs as a concrete location versus growing up in suburbia as an abstract state of mind.

so, i wrote it. and i’m pretty proud of it if you ask me. i wanted to write about where i’m from, and i wanted to write about how where i’m from has affected me. i wrote about the suburbs, and i learned that maybe my home isn’t as bad as i’d made it out to be.

and with that, i highly recommend that you all go listen to this beautiful album (i’ll be waiting here for you to tell me if you like it), and i hope you enjoyed the suburbs.

the suburbs  (continued) // arcade fire

for seven years, the place i called home never truly felt like home. i always felt like the outsider, the outlier, the vines of kudzu that eat ate the trees and cover everything in green. i was the puzzle piece that never quite fit right. i was the flower that couldn’t be planted with the other seeds in the bed.

only after leaving to find what i thought would be my new home did i realize just how much at home i felt in hernando.

i spent seven years sitting and waiting, and in all that time, i never quite knew what i was waiting for. maybe now that i’m not waiting anymore, i’m realizing that what i was waiting for was for home to finally feel like home. i wasn’t waiting to find a new home or waiting for suburbia to fertilize the soil i was planted in. i was waiting to feel home, not just reside in it.

i wasted so much of my time and so much of my energy trying to escape, and now i sit here and miss home. i miss ladybug bakery and my chemistry class and la siesta and the kroger marketplace and commerce street. i miss the town i’ve come too know and love but didn’t even realize i love until i was leaving it.

i never expected to be sitting here at a school i’ve dreamed of for so many years because i saw it as my chance to get away from home and actually miss home.

maybe suburbia just creeps up on you when you least expect it, and maybe it crept up on me seven years too late. maybe that feeling i’d been searching for the whole time was always there, and i just had to sit down for a minute and find it. it’s the one puzzle piece you spend ages looking for, just for it to have been right under your nose the whole time.

i’m okay with admitting that i miss home. i’m okay with admitting that writing this series has helped me realize that the things i’d assumed about the suburbs are wrong. but if it weren’t for those wrong assumptions, i can tell you for a fact that i would not be sitting here right now.

for seven years, i let the suburbs motivate me to get out of them. i let them push me to want to find where i belonged.

i still don’t quite know where i belong yet. i don’t know where i’m going, and i don’t know how i’m going to get there, but i know where i’m from, and only i can decide where to go from there.

sprawl i (flatland) // arcade fire, sprawl ii (mountains beyond mountains) // arcade fire

sprawl is defined by merriam-webster as “the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city.” the word can be synonymous with the suburbs, but i don’t know if i’d agree. then again, maybe i don’t know that much about the suburbs.

but i think hernando is the sprawl. hernando is this little town that veers off from the main interstate like a weigh station. within walking distance from my house is the track and field park, the children’s park, several churches and locally-owned shops, and town square. last year, our kroger was demolished and up-sized to a kroger marketplace. everyone was buzzing about it for months, mostly because it was supposed to have a starbucks in it. a starbucks and a little food court and an actual cheese section, which my dad was very excited about.

hernando was always homey, but it never quite felt like home. it always felt like a halfway-home. an in-between. not quite backwoods country, not quite big shining city.

there used to be times when i thought i’d never really get out. that i’d be doomed to live in the suburban purgatory that i never quite belonged in forever. i wanted to go out and find my people. i wanted to find people who didn’t tell me that my hopes and expectations were unrealistic.

i wanted to find those people here, but i don’t think i’ve found them yet. it’s like i’m still stuck in a halfway-home that i should feel like i belong to, but don’t.

when i’m going back home, back to hernando and the kroger marketplace and the community that never quite felt like community, i actually feel like i’m home again. when driving back to msa, my mom always texts me when i get in, “home?” and i say yes, because techincally, msa is home.

but it doesn’t quite feel like home. it feels like the in-between again. and i’m so tired of being stuck in the in-between. i want a place to certifiably call home, i want concrete and certainty and home, and i’ve started to realize just how at home i actually feel in hernando.

when school first started, i didn’t want to come home. i dreaded every weekend i would have to go back and be away from my true home, but now i long for the days i see commerce street. i long for the days i can walk into la siesta and shake our waiter’s hand and he knows exactly what i want before i can form the words on my tongue. i long for the familiarity and the comfort and the community i didn’t realize i had until i wasn’t in it anymore.

i don’t quite know where home is. i know i have homes, but i don’t know where my home is. i don’t know where i live. maybe i never will get out of the sprawl.

but then again, maybe i don’t want to.

we used to wait // arcade fire

since coming here, everything i used to do at home has become past tense. the life i’ve known for seven years has become the life i knew, as cliche as that sounds. my old daily routines have become old habits i finally managed to break.

time always feels slower at home. the days seem to drag on forever, the seconds growing longer and longer as i would sit and wait. but i always ended up on the same bus route home, listening to the same music as i stared out the window from the same seat and watched the same storefronts go by.

but here, i can hardly blink before august becomes october. the storefronts seem to rearrange themselves every time i leave the high school to come back to campus.

i spent so much of my time in the suburbs just waiting, and i don’t even know what i was really waiting for. i guess i was just waiting for something new to happen. i was waiting for change. i was hoping the breeze would catch the town just right and shift everything just a little bit off-kilter. i waited as if i thought something else had to come along and change my life for me.

then i applied for msa. and was accepted into the audition stage of msa. and was actually accepted into msa. and actually started changing my life on my own accord.

but everything is changing so much faster than i’d prepared myself for. the days fly by like someone’s actually tearing pages from a calendar, and i feel like i’m wasting what little time i have here. i wasted too many hours sitting on my bed and waiting for the world to change around me instead of going out there and changing it myself, and i’ll be damned if i’m gonna sit here and let the world change faster than i can change it.

at home, all i ever did was wait. i sat and waited and procrastinated and made absolutely nothing of myself, and i’m not gonna let that be who i am here. i’m not gonna just let myself sit here and wait on the breeze to blow me away. i’m so sick of just watching friends become strangers and waiting for strangers to become friends.

it’s my turn to change things, and change will come.

deep blue // arcade fire

i’ve always loved looking at the sky. whether it was bright and full of clouds or dark and starry-eyed, i loved staring at it. my skies never needed clouds or stars to catch my attention.

i’ve never really figured out what i love so much about staring at the sky, even when there’s nothing in it to stare at. maybe i just love the expansiveness of it, how unending the blue sheets that encase us in our earthy bed really are.

maybe i love looking up and seeing nothing and everything at the same time. one little pinpoint in the sky could be a straight shot to the center of the universe–if there even is one. i can never imagine just how much is out there that we’ve yet to explore, but sometimes i like to try.

most nights when my family would be driving home from a play or a rehearsal or something else, all i could see when i looked up was deep blue. too many headlights on interstates or streetlights in neighborhoods for a star to be seen. but when we got home, when our car crept up into our driveway and i opened my door to go inside, i could see stars.

one good thing about small towns: the lights are never on when you want to look at stars.

i’ve always been able to look above my house and see orion. a stereotypical constellation, but one i love all the same. the first thing i do when getting out of the car after a long drive is look up. i can look up and see those three little stars that make his belt and know that i’m home.

there’s just something about the sky and the stars that inspires something paradoxical in me. they make me feel so alone and small on this little rock, but they also make me feel like we can’t possibly be alone.

when you look up and see stars that burned out eons ago, watching ghosts as they poke little white holes in blue sheets, everything you do almost feels insignificant. the universe is bigger than you or i could ever even fathom, even though all i can see of it from where i stand in my driveway is deep blue.

maybe in all of my isolation, in the suburbia that never found purchase in my veins, i found solace in the sky. i found solace in looking up at those little white holes, at orion’s belt that greeted me above my house every night without fail for seven years. maybe i felt alone at home, but i look at those stars that could be suns for planets we haven’t seen yet and don’t feel quite so lonely anymore.

i can look up and wonder what aliens see our sun and wonder if some faraway planets orbit it as they do their own sun. i can even wonder if my friends are staring at the same stars i am, and the loneliness i feel in daylight subsides.

i guess i find comfort in knowing that we share the same sky.

wasted hours // arcade fire

maybe part of my hang-ups with the suburbs come from all the time i wasted doing nothing. maybe i never felt suburbia because i never tried to. i never knew what there was to do, never knew enough people to get me out of the house, never had enough motivation to actually try to do things.

all i ever did was stare. i stared out the bus window on the way home from school and watched kids in their cars with their after-school plans. i stared from my bedroom window at the dirty asphalt as new houses were being built across the street. i started at my phone as i scrolled through instagram, seeing everyone i know with their friends having fun and wondering why i couldn’t have that.

i wasted more time than i can count looking at people i know and wondering why they got to be happy and i didn’t.

all i wanted was to be somewhere that could let me feel like they did, to be someone who was actually capable of feeling like they did.

i say the suburbs isolated me, but maybe i isolated myself. maybe the nights i spent sitting on my bed staring at popcorn ceilings instead of chasing sunsets with giggly friends are why suburbia never seeped into my bones. i never allowed myself to actually live in the suburbs.

i always blame myself for these kinds of things. the isolation is my fault, the lack of friends is my fault, the desire to be anywhere but where i am is my fault. i could have at least tried to go out. i could have at least tried to feel suburbia.

but i didn’t. and now it’s too late to go try to chase sunsets with friends after school. if i’d known that the absence of suburbia was my fault, maybe i would’ve done something about it. maybe i’d be a different person than i am now. maybe i wouldn’t even be sitting here writing this. maybe i’d be sitting in a hernando high school classroom, laughing with friends behind the teacher’s back as she spoke. maybe i’d actually be participating in homecoming this week; i think today was disney day.

i’d love to be someone who actually fit in, someone who could actually grow in the soil she was planted in.

maybe i just wasn’t made to grow.

month of may // arcade fire

may meant the beginning of the end.

for everyone else, may meant summer. may meant school was almost over and that everyone’s long-anticipated plans to go on vacations or do absolutely nothing were all on the horizon.

for me, it meant that i was only three months away from changing everything. may was the precursor to a summer full of counseling summer camps, and summer was a precursor to msa.

i wanted the days to fly by, bringing me closer and closer to school before i’d even realized how much time had already passed. i wanted everything to go faster and faster and faster until the calendars turned to august and it was time to make a new home.

may was full of new. may meant it was time to start pulling my roots and planting them into a new pot. it meant cutting away all the weeds that the suburbs had wound around my stem in hopes of keeping me in its stagnant clutches and suffocating me.

i may have been the kudzu, but suburbia wasn’t going to keep its grips on me.

so i uprooted myself. i packed up any sentiments i may have held towards any parts of hernando and tucked them under my bed. my old bed. the bed that has all of my yearbooks since kindergarten under it. the bed that has my old baby blanket and books i haven’t touched but can’t bring myself to get rid of under it.

i wasn’t putting anything old under my new bed. new beds meant sleeping in new places, and new places meant new things to hold sentiment to.

i was getting ready to start all over again.

for me, the month of may has always meant new. it’s always meant change or rebirth or some other thing that leaves some part of you feeling new. it’s a feeling i can’t really describe, but i know you know what that feeling is. maybe you felt it on your last day of school before coming here. maybe you felt it on your last day of summer before moving in. maybe you felt it late one night this summer when you finally realized that everything was about to change.

we all started over. actually, it’s more like i started over, and how i viewed everyone else started over with me.

they didn’t really change much, but i did.

i am.