This past summer I went to stay with my Grandfather in Virginia for two weeks. I used to do this every summer as a child, but I vehemently stopped after my fourteenth birthday. However, my Grandmother died a few months ago, and I went to repent my remorse and guilt by putting myself in close proximity to the widower. My Grandfather is aging fast, he looks now unlike any memory I have of him, mostly due to his frailness (exasperated by the back and heart surgeries, and the new no-sugar, no-salt diet they have him on). When I arrived I was confronted with a passage of time that is easily forgotten in the college bubble.

The two months before leaving for Virginia, I was living at my parent’s house in Brooklyn. I was fully leaning into what I thought it meant to be in my twenties in the City. I woke up at twelve, got a coffee with a friend, maybe went shopping, worked three hours as a hostess at a seafood restaurant, and then got drinks or went dancing at a club till three or four in the morning. I found it exhausting and exhilarating: feeling the intricacies of independence in the flopping and flailing. As June turned into July, however, my choices began to feel like the ones I was supposed to be making, and most of the time I got near-to-nothing out of all the partying besides a bad hangover, angry texts from a friend, and $75 missing from my checking account. Then I took the forty-five minute flight to Virginia, and it was almost immediately that I was confronted with myself: there were cicadas trilling outside my window, and when I sat up to look for them all I found was that I was unrecognizable in the glass’ reflection.

On my first day in Virginia I tried to go for a run, but felt vulnerable in the echoes of all the homes and the lawns and ended up cutting it short. Then I walked up and down the stairs until someone finally said we were leaving the house. I showered and got ready, gold hoops and matching necklaces, a blue slip: We were going to Walmart. I went to bed at ten that night, unsure of what I was doing there, but more than that, realizing that I had no idea what I wanted. I felt like no one without the allure of the City, and the constant availability of activities, and friends, peers, and dates- all at my dispense. In any sense, I ignorantly decided that night that the suburbs allocates itself to a sort of prison. In it’s inextricable form and function, it felt diluted almost to nothing. The home became the world, and there was no reason to leave unless for work. And once home, you only leave again if you want Burger King or Chick-fil-a. I decided that the creation of the home was allocated to only two acceptable activities: the binge-eating of junk food, and the binge-watching of absurdly inappropriate television (inappropriate in it’s meaninglessness, not in any explicitness). I felt ripped out of something for the first few nights. The silence made me angry.

But one early morning, deep into my stay, I went to church with my Grandfather in order to spend some time alone with him. And at church it wasn’t just the fashion that was diverse and unstable against my preconceived notions, but there was a sincerity that has been lost on me in the City. In the City I can lie and tell myself that there’s still subjectivity, and that objective culture has not yet reached us. In Virginia, the malls and sweatpants convinced me that I had entered into monoculture. It’s problematic that I had to enter a communal-space in order to feel differently. At first my interactions were brief and not up to par against the sweetness and politeness of the Southern church woman. And then, the longer I was there, and the more sermons I attended, the easier it came to me. In place of my accusatory defense mechanisms came the fact that I cared. I began to get excited about the prospect of interacting with the teenager in the drive-through or the woman checking out next to me at the Goodwill.

The more time I spent in suburbia the more I realized that New York’s criticism of the kitsch, has become the satirical of the kitsch, and now, I’ve decided, kitsch is all that’s really left. Kitsch is no longer the proletariat’s to claim. The mechanical and the conscious has saturated the City– or at least the narcissistic, wealthy liberal-arts social scene that I find myself in. Now all the fashion and music and the arts and all the little niche “creatives” that reside in the corners of the most northern part of Brooklyn abide by all the same rules. The literalness now expounds on every corner, “beautiful women”, “deport trump”, “matriarchy now” stamped on t-shirts on every G train. Even leftists subscribe to the ambiguity of an alt-culture, that is actually not ambiguous at all: sneaky in obfuscating something formulated and normative. Your sustainable, charity-giving CBD oil still just wants your money, and (sorry! but) you paying fifty dollars for a tincture is more embarrassing, more kitsch than any mall-brand fast fashion.

The City is all imitated effect, whereas affect seemed to propel suburbia. Feeling affected, that’s where I realized I had changed in my few weeks away. I was feeling, seeing, taking everything so slowly that I began to recognize the patterns of the sun in-line with the patterns of my day. And now that I mention it, my desires for productivity and creativity come alive when I’m in the suburbs. I assume this is how people who move to the city from the Midwest feel, like their creativity expands and they are dying to just make, make, make until they can’t breathe anymore! The opportunities to show and share what you make are certainly more in a metropolis, but the time and the inspiration to do so seem selfishly available in suburbia.

Suburbia doesn’t hide inside itself, unlike the city which is tokenized by its miserableness. In the suburbs it just is miserableness. Not discussed, undiagnosed, and in the end there is a happiness that makes for something like beautiful poetry or a sweet song on a piano. The romanticization of miserableness is not an ignorant one, it’s a feeling, a way to create meaning in the every-day. I think about Neruda and occupying everything: I moved into my body (not its projection, I mean my flesh). Even when I was younger, there was no victimization of hardships at my Grandparents’ house. No one ever asked, “Why me?”, and in place of that justified thumb-sucking– I wanted to be happy. All the time I want to be happy actually. And laying out by the above-ground pool in my Grandfather’s semi-manicured backyard I felt the desire so aggressively that just the possibility of being happy made me happy for the first time in a while. And maybe this was out of survival instinct (the poverty and depressing syndication of an American Dream is palpable at my Grandfather’s house). But in any case, I wanted it. And in the city I only ever want to feel bad for myself. In the city it feels embarrassing to desire good things. Yet at my Grandfather’s I needed happiness, I needed good things, maybe not for survival per se, but for sanity.

There is no dematerialization of the politics in the City. Whereas politics becomes solely surreal in the suburbs in it’s buried reality. Politics in Virginia, a notorious swing state, seem tangible because of the dissociative attribute of it all. What do people need right now? Well at my Grandfather’s we needed food, we needed medicare, and we needed to keep our house. My Grandfather is famous for his anti-planned parenthood stance and climate change disbelief, but he is also known for his charity work, for opening up his home to distant family who’ve recently immigrated to the states. The political kitsch of the city means that we sit at brunch and regurgitate white-feminist signs we see at women’s marches, “Keep your hands off my pussy!”, and “Yeah Time is Up, we need a woman president!”. If you consider yourself outside of the neoliberal functionings, then you and your friends shout about Bernie in a crowded dollar bar in Bushwick. Looking at my Grandfather, I felt the pressure of politics in the complexities of his needs and beliefs. Most shocking to me is the fact that his immigrant past doesn’t deter him from supporting The Wall. But it’s also not shocking: It makes sense that he practices some political form of hypocrisy. In the city we all do, but at least his is honest. In the city I fall down the Bernie hole; yapping about the Green New Deal all the way from Broadway-Lafayette and into Aritzia. My Grandfather just wants his back surgery. In the suburbs change and politics are two separate things, the former a necessity, a right-now, but the latter a circus in which no one has the time to perform in. My grandfather is too tired to march.

But this is also just a story. This is not a criticism, it is a personal rewiring. If anything, I am only critical of myself. In my redistribution of priorities, the one that toiled with me the most was my smoking. In the suburbs any addiction is not less prevalent, but much more menacing in its inability to hide itself in club bathrooms and conversations with your ex-boyfriend on a sidewalk outside a cheap bar. There is nothing beautiful about going for a “run” at your Grandfather’s place to smoke and then spray perfume a couple of cul-de-sacs away. If we must all die, we must all die the same way (violence, tragedy, or a lack of desire for the perfect, healthy body). My whole life I have been a present person, not in mindfulness but in impulsivity and in my resignation to a shitty life. I work ten plus hours at the gym only to feel good in the few hours afterwards, only to look good in the present-tense. The smoking and drinking and drugs have obliterated any notion that I may be working towards a divine body, working towards an immortality-state. Plus I’ve always despised yoga in all its forms (pilates, bar, ballet, vinyasa, I’ve tried them all). Not one of my relatives at my Grandfather’s house wants a divine body under “wellness”, but there is incessant divinity in the institution of the church. I’ve only ever known my Grandfather to work for a future. Through his journey of immigration, juggling jobs, and praying daily I pale in comparison with my masochism (addictions, anorexia, toxic partners). I selfishly refrain, or at least perform refrain against survival or the survival of any beautiful life in the future.

Maybe I’m extrapolating and this is not a city/suburbs thing but a youth thing, or maybe a first-generation thing, or maybe something about late-capitalism that felt put on pause for me in my weeks in the suburbs. All I know is that I am tired of the makeup (armor, not cosmetics) against the stimuli of the metropolis. So no, I do not dream about a heaven, or salvation. But when I got back to the city in August I did have lots of dreams about laying out in the sun by my Grandfather’s above-ground pool.