{"id":718,"date":"2017-10-11T15:48:14","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T20:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/?p=718"},"modified":"2017-10-11T15:48:14","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T20:48:14","slug":"the-suburbs-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/2017\/10\/11\/the-suburbs-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"the suburbs (pt. 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

ready to start \/\/ arcade fire<\/a><\/p>\n

i always wanted to leave the suburbs.<\/p>\n

or at least, i wanted to feel something more.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

but i was outgrowing the suburbs.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

i wanted to crack concrete and move houses from their foundations and unsettle all the settlement that everyone else had let overcome them.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

i wanted so badly to finally plant myself and grow, but my roots never truly found purchase.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “the suburbs (pt. 2)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":807,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions\/807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}