Words: 6,575
hella smut.
I’ve grown familiar with the ritualistic dullness of suburbia. An endless array of houses, all looking the exact same, partitioned by white picket fences was all I’d ever known. Nobody ever left the familiarity. Anyone born in the area spent their whole lives working boring desk jobs, clad in expensive suits and pencil skirts.
Rich housewives spent summer afternoons gossiping beside the backyard pools with icy margaritas in hand, while watching the sweat drip off their hardworking pool boys. All the while, their businessmen husbands spent their evenings rubbing their filthy hands up the thighs of their secretaries.
The children rode bicycles up and down the block, chasing down the ice cream trucks, while their teenage babysitters fret to keep up. Up in treehouses, adolescents were daring each other to give their first kisses away, as they sipped beer stolen from their parents. Their hearts would beat a little quicker in their chests as their lips grew closer to someone they had been secretly dying to get close to.
The few elderly neighbors sprinkled in the vicinity sat in chairs on their porches, quietly gossiping about the antics of the lively young people, claiming the country had been so much better when they were kids.
I never wanted to live my life that way. Born in the suburbs, then killed by the dreadful boringness of it all. Unlike my parents, neighbors, friends, and siblings, I had to get away. There was no way I would spend my whole life in a predictable cycle with death being the only high point in sight. So I left.
At a very young age I figured the worst thing that could happen is I would chase my dreams and they wouldn’t come true. If I failed, at least I would be able to say I tried. At which point, I would return to the imprisonment of suburban captivity and finish my meaningless existence in the slowly paced lifestyle.
Nobody in the neighborhood would have guessed that my pipe dreams of being a musician would ever come true. They didn’t know the songs I wrote and sang would be the soundtracks to their youth. But the name they all gossiped about, quickly became the same name radio jockeys announced before blasting my music. The same one LL Cool J spoke as he handed me the Grammy for Album of the Year.
But as I stood in the perfectly manicured lawn that I used to ride my bicycle in, for the first time in five years, I realized how naïve I had been. The worst thing that could have happened to me wasn’t the possibility of my dream failing. It was something much worse.
My parents were ill-prepared for my return home. They didn’t know I’d be standing with a Louis Vuitton suitcase on their front porch, begging for the comfort of the simple life. They surely wouldn’t expect the tears that had been streaming down my face since the previous night.
The house that I grew up in was different. The old familiar welcome mat that said ‘home is where the heart is’ was replaced by something made of straw. The rusty windchimes were gone completely. Even the ugly birdhouse my mother tried to make when I was a kid was removed.
What confused me even more was the fact that instead of being welcomed by my mother’s sympathetic face, I was greeted by someone else. Someone who had changed so little in the great length of time I’d been gone. Besides the dirty blonde hair of a beard and a shorter haircut, my neighbor Luke Hemmings looked the same as he always had.
“Damn all these identical houses.” I muttered, already turning on my heel to leave. Instead of slamming the door shut quickly, Luke waited until I was nearly to the end of the sidewalk to move. “Wait!” he hollered, chasing after me.
Perhaps the two of us would have been more thrilled to see each other had I left on better terms.
As children, Luke and I were best friends, despite all the teasing from some of the other kids. They would make kissy sounds whenever they walked by us and sneer at Luke about girls having cooties. It became cooler when we were preteenagers that we were friends. A lot of my other friends thought Luke was cute, while his were just jealous that he knew someone with boobs.
