5.23.2008

on: suburbia

When she was fifteen the streetlight proved something, somehow. Still too small, a vague agitation pulling at her chest near-constantly, she could huddle beneath cool suburban overhangs and trace the meaning of the streetlight's mystical morse-code flashes into a narrative the way her tongue folded ice into water that summer, over and over again. She had not yet forged her sense of beauty into something harder with edges and weight; that summer the signs were everywhere, impossible to ignore.. It only happened in the hours so late she'd be forced to creep through her own hallway, caressing bare feet across the few floor boards identified as silent through practice, bare legs splayed in awkward angles like the games she used to play crossing endless sand-boxes or baseball fields on scraps of plywood. Never touch the lava, the game whispered, pull your friends to safety like Indiana Jones. She couldn't have known at eight that instead of preparing her to save the world, the games would find their natural conclusion in sneaking across the house to the soft warning of her mother's snores with the deliciously clammy imprint of a single stolen cigarette sweating into her palm.

It would be so deep in night the only sounds were the mechanical hummings of kitchen appliances, the occasional shifting creak of the boiler downstairs. Once she was outside and the door had been silenced to a close the white noise amplified, refidgerators and television sets and coffee makers in every home rising to a collective murmur of static across the vast grid of her neighborhood.

She would never know why the streetlight strokes felt so personal, but they did, undeniably, and her private witness to the flickering yellow bulb never ceased to feel like a conversation with something important. Perhaps the headphones stretching their way across her dome were to blame, the sweeping sentimental chord progressions and whispering male vocals she only listened to after dark. Maybe it was the giddy headrush of the first twenty cigarettes thwarting her brain process already. The absurdity of the single streetlight could have stirred in her synapses an assosiation with the kinds of places where streetlights actually made sense, places where she imagined with her tentative world-view voices stronger than microwaves sang. But squinting across the slanted yard, past houses like glossy black and white promotional photographs, past the concrete bridge of her street, she would always rest her eyes on its singular elegant curve. And it would wink, spasm, burn out jerkily with the most subtle of percussionistic clicks, only that late, with only she and the too-quiet hum of the suburbs to witness it.

That summer too many white rabbits crossed her path. Once on the subway a man with crooked teeth and an even crookeder smile told her she would be very lucky as he slid through sliding doors, out into the windy cobblestones of Boston, lost forever but in poetic memory. She sucked ice violently until small, watery sores appeared on the roof of her mouth. These she worked at with her tongue, not content until they split across the wide geography behind her teeth. Later she would try to fashion these events into a long coffee-fueled time line, a real smoker now, a tentative high school graduate. She couldn't remember her first drink, skipped the date on which she breathlessly kissed her teenage-boy idol in the woods behind school. But the streetlight, she thought, was pretty important..
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