Author: Madison Cox

suburban war // arcade fire

the summer before i came here, i had an accumulative two weeks to spare. my summer was filled with jobs and vacations and camps, leaving me with the occasional saturday and the last week of july.

on june 10th, i took the act. that night, i was at a friend’s farm on the other side of town, setting his chemistry notes on fire. there were six of us–five in chemistry together, and another who just wanted to tag along.

i’d never done anything like it before. i’ve never been to high school parties, never had the friends that would invite me to hang out after school. i haven’t been to a single sleepover in two years. my friends were always temporary fixes, and i still don’t know which of us was the one getting fixed.

half of us were leaving. two of us going to the mississippi school for math and science, and one–me–going to mississippi school of the arts.

this was our one last hurrah before three of us never set foot in the halls of hernando high school again.

we ordered pizza and listened to music and rode around in the back of a stick-shift truck around one kid’s farm. we set pizza boxes and old notes on fire and rolled down a hill inside a huge piece of tubing that was just laying around under an awning. i still have a quarter-sized dark spot on my left knee from one particular roll where we all toppled over ourselves, scraping knees and dirtying clothes.

i’d never felt like there was anything in this town that i would miss until i sat in the back of that truck, wind pulling my hair into my mouth and behind my glasses, watching the trees and tall grass blend into streaks of green. until i watched the orange flames crackle in blue darkness as my favorite songs echoed from the cabin behind us. until i felt the sting of new scars on my kneecaps. i took a lot of pictures that day, and every now and then i still find myself admiring that particular sunset with our wind-blown backs in the foreground.

another night, four of us went to another kid’s house and walked around the woods behind his family’s property. we tried to start another fire, but the freshly rained-on grass wouldn’t let sparks catch. so we decided to drive to the park and around town, the sky already that particular shade of navy where you can just slightly differentiate it from the black silhouettes of trees, one of my favorite bands blaring through the open windows of his car. i took two pictures that night, both fuzzy flashes of fuzzy memories, but they’re two of my favorite pictures i’ve ever taken.

after seven years of craving suburbia, i’d finally found it. i’d finally found the people who made home a place for my heart to live in, to feel warm in.

suburbia never came to me with people i used to tell everything to. it came to me with people i’d known since we were all nine years old but had hardly gotten to know until we all happened to have chemistry together. maybe the academic chemistry had more to do with it than the personal chemistry, but maybe it doesn’t matter.

those nights are still soundtracked by my favorite songs, whether the songs came from the cabin’s external speakers or a car’s internal ones. with my old friends, one of the biggest things we had in common was always music. now, i can’t even imagine what songs they may now call their favorites. maybe i’ve finally changed enough that they can’t imagine mine, either.

half light i // arcade fire, half light ii (no celebration) // arcade fire

when i was nine years old, my parents told my brother and me that we were moving. they told us we’d be leaving our little right-side duplex house with our walls covered in crayon drawings and moving somewhere nicer.

i was more than ecstatic. my brother was less than thrilled.

i remember when we were driving around looking at houses that could potentially become our home. there were houses right next to highways where crickets chirped in broad daylight. there was one house that sat on top of a lake where all of the rooms could only be entered from the wooden walkway that wrapped around the exterior of the house.

but we ended up settling into a relatively new subdivision right next to the town square in hernando, mississippi. i could see the town track and field park from the driveway, and every house had a tree in its front yard.

in this new house in this new town, i used to be so excited for everything to be new. i was excited for my new school and my new friends and finally having the room to be a kid.

and everything did feel new. at first. but i never had the room to be a kid. my new friends were gone as soon as they’d been made, and my new school quickly became another creaky cog in the suburban machine.

i wanted to be able to actually run around and be free and see my town when the only lights are streetlights, the way i never could in my old town. but i wasn’t even allowed to walk around my neighborhood after school by myself. this town that i’d thought would be the place i could finally branch out was rapidly become that town that would leave in in the same pot forever.

the novelty of newness had faded, and all i wanted was to make my home feel welcoming again.

this past summer was the first time in my life i could finally explore my town when it’s illuminated only by streetlights. i could actually drive around town with the windows down and swing in the park when it’s dark out.

everything felt so new, and it was the first time since we’d moved that i’d felt that same excitement for the new.

before summer, i thought i’d never want to leave brookhaven. i thought going back to my roots, even just for two days every two weeks, would be the torture of tearing my fresh growth from its new soil

now, i long for the weekends i can replant my feet in the old soil.

every time i see that welcome sign, the streets feel a little newer than they did before.

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.

empty room // arcade fire

i was always alone.

even when i was surrounded by my friends, all i ever felt was alone. i could call someone’s name at the top of my lungs in a room full of people, but the room was always still somehow empty, like no one was even there at all.

suburbia left me in isolation, craving something more. it left me desiring something bigger than small town feelings.

i knew it was coming. i knew one day something would come along and pluck me from the suburbs and plant me where i belonged. for seven years i waited and waited, sitting in empty rooms and rooms only filled with empty lives.

when i was younger, everyone older than me looked like they were on fire. they looked fiery and inspired and passionate. in fourth and fifth grade, my friend down the street and i always looked up to her older sister. she was two years older than us and wiser than we could ever dream of being. our elementary paled in comparison to her middle school wisdom.

honestly, she intimidated us. we always wondered what it was like to be that old, to be that grown up. the way she walked and the way she talked left us wondering what growing up would look like for us.

then we were the ones growing up. only the girl down the street and i didn’t talk anymore. we were the intimidating middle schoolers to the little kids in the neighborhood, and i realized that her sister wasn’t on fire anymore. the sparks were gone and all that was left was the same grey that would take me over if i let it.

but i wasn’t going to let it. i wasn’t going to let growing up empty my soul out and turn me into a ghost of suburban future. i wasn’t going to let the emptiness that consumed them consume me, too.

so i laid low. i let them paint me over with their blacks and greys and pretended to be like them, but they could never touch the colors that coated my insides. i was going to grow up, but it wouldn’t be like them. i wasn’t going to become the people i’ve watched fall away time and time again. all i had to do was wait, and if it took forever, then forever it would be.

rococo // arcade fire

growing up in the suburbs, you see people gain and lose their individuality. you watch sense of selves fade and meld from all these different beaming colors into one uniform shade of grey.

it’s sad, really. to see kids whose eyes used to be so wildly and unabashedly optimistic start turning to the same dull sheen that overtook their parents’ eyes all those years ago.

everyone just settles. they settle for in-state colleges and universities because of the scholarship opportunities, or at least a college that’s only a half-hour from the state line. they settle for moving two towns over rather than two states over. no one ever seems to allow themselves the privilege to explore the world outside familiar subdivisions and farmers’ markets.

but me, i’ve never been one to settle. i’ve always been one to dream outside of suburbia. i’ve always blatantly refused even contemplating attending any school anywhere near mississippi. not even ole miss, a school renowned for its writing programs.

i don’t want to be stuck like everyone else is. much like the queen song, i want to break free. i don’t want to be stuck singing the same songs and saying the same things and letting my colors meld into that same shade of grey that everyone else has let themselves be painted in.

i don’t like where i live. i never really have liked where i live. it’s why i came here. and it’s why i want to leave still. i want to see a welcome to mississippi sign for the last time and never once dream of looking back.

now, this doesn’t mean forgetting where i come from. this doesn’t mean leaving my family or my friends behind. it means allowing myself the ability to see more than what’s familiar. it means allowing myself to meet new people and make new friends and form new families. i want to give myself room to breathe, and suburbia has been choking me since the moment i set foot on its well-watered grass.

to me, staying would be conforming, and i’ve never really been much of a conformist. even when i try to fit in with everyone else, the edges just don’t fit right. all of my puzzles pieces are jagged and wrong, probably even from a completely different box.

i’m just trying to find the rest of my puzzle pieces, and they aren’t here.

modern man // arcade fire

we were stuck.

we all were.

we’d gotten ourselves caught up in the suburban life, allowing ourselves to succumb to the fate of growing up in a small town and never getting out of it.

or worse: getting out and finding ourselves crawling back home.

but i always wanted to get out. i always wanted to run away from the community that never truly made me feel welcome.

and i knew i could. i knew that one day i would drive past the welcome signs and never once look back. i knew that my life wouldn’t stagnate in the town i never really belonged in.

so they ask, “who do you want to be?” “what do you want to be?”

and i reply, “i want to be a writer.”

“pick something more realistic,” they demand. they wanted a change, something practical.

so i give it to them.

“i want to be a teacher.” “i want to be a doctor.” “i want to be a hematologist.” “i want to be a pediatric surgeon.”

sure, the dreams i told them i had were still things i was interested in, but they weren’t passionate. and i think dreams have to be passionate for them to become anything at all.

i let them change what dreams came out of my mouth, but they could never change the dreams the grew from my brain like wildflowers.

i kept my dreams to myself and watched as they left their own dreams behind. i watched as they assimilated to never leaving the state to go to college, and never leaving the county to start a family. i watched people bloom and wither away into caricatures of the american south.

i saw people open their mouths when asked what they want to be when they grow up only to close them again, returning to the question with something thought more appropriate by the adults who had their dreams shattered by suburbia. they’d let suburbia cloud their ambitions and hopes, and they were trying to make us kids do the same.

but i wasn’t going to let them turn me into another suburban machine. i wasn’t going to let them make me be something i didn’t feel. they weren’t going to poison the wildflowers that grew in my brain.

after all, it was those very wildflowers, that very determination to be what i wanted to be when i grew up, that brought me here.

ready to start // arcade fire

i always wanted to leave the suburbs.

or at least, i wanted to feel something more.

sure, i love the town i grew up in. i love the friends i made and the person it helped me become. i love knowing every nook and cranny of its streets. i love being able to walk into la siesta and have every waiter know exactly what my family is ordering the moment we sit down.

but i was outgrowing the suburbs.

i was outgrowing the friends who never felt quite like family. i was outgrowing the nooks and crannies like an old t-shirt that just didn’t fit right anymore. i wanted something more substantial than living in the same town with the same people and never going anywhere.

people say, “grow where you’re planted,” but i didn’t want to stick my roots in the same place forever. i wanted to blossom, i wanted to send seeds across city limits and state lines. i wanted to bloom past what i’d always known and grow somewhere else.

i wanted to crack concrete and move houses from their foundations and unsettle all the settlement that everyone else had let overcome them.

but i was the kudzu that consumes our state. i was foreign, sullying everything in my path with invasive green. it covered trees that had grown for generations and sucked the life from their roots.

but my green wasn’t tree green, it was new green. it was the green of fresh faces in new places. it was entering a community that had locked the gates to interwoven groves of family trees long before i could even fathom breaking the chains.

i knew my vines were cutting of the life of trees that had grown where ancestors planted them when it was still called jefferson, before hernando desoto found a river and changed its namesake forever. my vines were suffocating a community i never truly belonged in, so i withdrew my sprouting entanglement with this new home and potted myself, confined to my own clay solitude in the suburbs.

i wanted so badly to finally plant myself and grow, but my roots never truly found purchase.

so i spent my life in the suburbs waiting. i waited for someone to come along and see me outgrowing that clay pot and shatter it. i waited for someone to see that i was ready to grow past the town and take over the world.

the suburbs // arcade fire

i spent seven years of my life in the suburbs. in a town where everyone knew everyone’s name and your classmate’s mom was probably your first grade teacher. but i didn’t know everyone’s names, and my teachers were never my friends’ moms.

i grew up in the suburbs, but i didn’t grow up in suburbia.

to me, suburbia is a feeling. something you have to grow up in to actually feel. in my town, suburbia is the kids who have memberships to the country club. they’re the kids who actually throw parties when their parents aren’t home. they’re the kids who will wake up at ungodly hours of the morning to go hunting on weekends. they’re the kids who ride their bikes around town and get milkshakes at velvet cream on friday nights.

these are the kids who lived next door to each other all their lives. these are the kids who knew each other all their lives, grew up together like family.

but i didn’t know anybody. i never had the pool parties or the friends to bike around town with or to go to velvet cream with. i didn’t even learn how to ride a bike until i moved to the suburbs because the gentrified small-town pavements were finally safer than the cracked concrete of my old town.

one time in my old house in my old town, my brother and i made friends with some kids who lived in the apartments behind our house. my parents built a fence and we never saw them again.

but even in this new town where i thought i could finally be a kid, i couldn’t walk around my neighborhood unless my brother went with me, which he never wanted to do. i didn’t know anyone to play outside with, and i didn’t know how to find them. i always wanted to find a home in the suburbs. i wanted the pool parties and the bike rides and the familiarity of people who felt like family, but i didn’t have that feeling everyone else grew up with.

there was one girl in this new neighborhood that was my age; she was the first friend i made in this new town. in fourth and fifth grade, i would go over to her house after school, and we would ride our bikes around the neighborhood. with her, i thought i was finally starting to feel suburbia seeping into my bones.

one day, she stopped answering the door. i haven’t ridden a bicycle since.

the question looms over me like everything did when i was a little kid. little six year old me is staring up with her little blue eyes and little white teeth and little pink bow in her hair, and everything feels gigantic. and when you’re six years old, it feels like everything’s gonna stay like this forever. the chairs are always going to be to big you feel like they swallow you whole every time you sit down. the door handles are always going to require tippy-toes to reach. you’ll always have to jump on the counter to reach the top cabinet in the kitchen to find the paper plates that are shaped like animals.

but then you get older. you get taller and longer and stronger. the chairs become smaller and the door handles become lower and the cabinets become easier to reach (although if you’re my size you definitely still have to hop onto the counter to find the honey in the back of the cabinet).

nothing got smaller. you just got bigger.

you grew.

i grew.

and maybe one day i’ll grow even more, and the question that makes my heart speed up every time i look at it won’t tower over me anymore. maybe i’ll become even bigger and stronger, and asking what i want to be remembered for will be as trivial as my birthday or my favorite color.

but until then, i have to sit on the question like the big chairs and think about it. what do i want to be remembered for? do i want to be remembered for one of the many facets of my personality? do i want to be remembered for my wit or my sense of humor? or do i want to be remembered for the aesthetics? do i want people to remember my laugh or my sense of style? or do i want to be remembered for my accomplishments? do i want to be remembered for the impact the books i hope to write will have on the world or the way my poetry moved people?

i don’t know what i want to be remembered for quite yet, and i don’t know what version of me is going to be remembered when there’s no me to be memorable anymore. maybe 15-year-old me is the me remembered by friends i made at art camp. maybe 18-year-old me will be the me remembered by the msa class of 2020. maybe 30-something-year-old me will be remembered by the people who read my books.

who i want to be and who i am now are two sides of the same coin, but i’m learning to let the space between them inspire me, not terrify me.

i don’t believe in astrology. i don’t think that planetary alignments and and constellation patterns can coincide with birthdays and completely determine who someone is. i don’t think we can read daily horoscopes that predict certain outcomes in our lives. and don’t get me started on all of that sun, moon, rising, retrograde mess; understanding that is beyond my comprehension and i willingly admit that. that’s a no from me, kids.

but i still love reading “the signs as…” posts. i still love zodiac moodboards and analyses and saying “AQUARIUS AF” when i read a description that i think is pretty accurate to my personality. even though these specific descriptions of astrological signs are general traits that nearly everyone exhibits at one point or another and recognize that, i still find myself becoming invested in “what backpack are you based on your sign.”

i don’t know what it is about astrology posts that fascinates me. maybe it’s the psychoanalytical part. maybe it’s finding validation in the way i perceive myself. maybe it’s solidifying the knowledge i’ve gathered about my friends with completely unfounded evidence to prove my assumptions.

everyone loves being right, and no one likes to believe that they are wrong. so when we read this astrology posts that peg what type of person we are while falling in love or our best traits, we want them to align with our own ideas on who we are. and when these posts fit our ideals, we rally in this reassurance that we know ourselves and have a sense of self. we find pride in being agreed with about ourselves.

but when these posts don’t fit with our assumptions about ourselves, how do we react? some of us may scoff it off, say “pssh, that’s not right” and defer the responsibility of being wrong from ourselves. we can’t be wrong because we know ourselves best, right?

then there are those of us who see these mismatched assumptions and begin to question everything they’ve ever thought about themselves. are they really as introverted as they think they are, even when this post says they’re a more extroverted sign?

as superficial and meaningless as we may tell ourselves these posts are, they can still manage to leave us questioning everything we thought we knew about ourselves. astrology is a very efficient way to shatter your sense of self, especially if it wasn’t as unwavering as you thought it was.

so let me say this: the stars do not determine your fate. mercury in retrograde means nothing, air signs mean nothing. the only thing that matters is you, which means you don’t need to be worrying about what kind of partner you are based on your sign. nothing else can determine who you are except for you alone. no suns or moons or stars can tell you what your life is, only you.