I think this is because I’m inherently afraid of transitions, and I’m putting myself into several of the shoes I imagine they might have worn, the people in the houses at the edge, creased brown oxfords stained with oil spots from work, or modest loafers maybe? Highway’s comin’ Harold, she says, in a character portrayal that must be done by the venerable character actor Siobhan Fallon Hogan.
No, this is getting hyberbolic and I mean to convey the real life physical pain I encounter if my mind dwells too long in another person’s suffering.
The idea that one day there was a neighborhood, and the next there was a neighborhood actively being erased by the literal vehicle of human economic progress, is too much for my delicate soul to traverse.
I call it delicate, of course, because I know that I did not actually live out this devastating fate of having and losing and adapting, and here’s where I perhaps unfairly assert the trajectory that sees our main character suffer in all the little ways that amount to crushed hopes and dashed possibilities in the capital crusade that is the united states economy.
Did the house value stagnate when the rest of the country surged? Was she forever prevented from changing her circumstances by selling that house? Were the neighborhood social ties largely destroyed? Did her marriage end? Were her children able to succeed? What the fuck is success anyway?
So I am a snowflake, but I melt and reconstitute several hundred times per day, so that makes me a tough one. I’m a survivor, right? (I have technically survived, having practiced survival, and thus I am in fact a survivor.)
But you know I’m also a non-self-aggrandizing narcissist because I put that Admission of Survivorship in parenthesis to make sure we all remember that I don’t technically like myself all the way (even though I do a lot more now). Nevertheless I find it difficult to take anything from anyone ever, including implicit compliments, but not limited to the chicken soup with pastina that my kind neighbor delivered to me after I’d admitted (admitting again!) that my kids had been sick for two weeks and I was kinda losing it and also coming down with it.
Just to be clear, the implicit compliments I’m referring to are your continued eye movements and your synapses doing their synapting to handle the reading comprehension, as if the mere act of consuming (and maybe spitting out, I don’t care)* my thoughts, that act which involves physical and mental tasks that many would consider too grave to undertake, constitutes a compliment.
*see? I do very much care but I also don’t, in a playing finite games kind of way, when I can tap into the river experience of existence. Can’t grab it, can’t change it, unless you’re a beaver. The point is I love you.
I love you for the compliment of spending this time with me. But also for all your separate you-ness.
So anyway, the way I see the transitions in the neighborhoods at the periphery issue is as if all the stories rush toward me at once. And they’re sticky and I have to wade through them and pull them back from my shoulders and one or three are usually stowaways like leaches to be wrestled back whenever they’re finally noticed.
