i drove around for hours
A few weeks ago I was stuck in the white-hot edge-of-suburban July, back in my hometown and struggling to hold on to my sense of reality.
My hometown and the surrounding areas within which I used to romp are not inherently bad places. They are clean and safe, but they are under no stretch of the imagination likely to be considered very remarkable. Despite this, a total body transformation always overtakes me upon my return. I become irritable, depressed, acting upon old compulsions, filled with teenage malaise. My routines are upturned and I lament having to drive everywhere. I listen to old songs that make me feel quite bad.
I remember so deeply in my bones what it felt like to have nowhere else to go. Waiting and waiting for the years to pass until I would leave for a place that could feel better, but there was no guarantee. The memory of that feeling comforts present-day me because despite how out-of-body I might have felt being there back in July, at least I know now that home is somewhere else and it is solid and real and filled with 'my' people and 'my' things.
Living in a big city these days, I find myself less and less in the company of people who come from smaller places. There are a handful of former suburbanites who sort of understand these feelings, but I have found a real lack of people who can really get it, those who understand that grey curtain that can enshroud an upbringing in a small place. I know this isn't a rare experience, certainly there are millions of people who have gone from their small hometowns to big cities to thrive, but I have seen very few depictions of this that have felt true to my experience. I have been left to grapple with what the past was like, all on my own.
Just before going back, I watched a movie called Drinking and Driving. It's by two Canadian filmmakers called Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank. The film is currently beginning to be picked up for distribution and it has only played a few film festivals in North America and Europe for now. D&D grabbed me by the throat — it depicts all these feelings and memories in a way that feels extremely eerie to me, too close for comfort. The movie follows two girls in their 20s, friends who live in a little town and spend most of their time going to parties and working and sleeping with their weird friends and running into the same people over and over again. They drink because that sounds like fun, and hang out in parking lots and go to the water on their days off. Every scene of this film feels familiar: dancing around at a kind of lame party with some guy you sort of know DJing under a half covered porch, off-putting encounters in the basements of random houses, sleeping on a trampoline, talking to your best friend about the life you are living and how there is nowhere else to go. There is some sort of open joy mixed with a passive sadness in all this. The film is not wholly anything. It's exactly what it is like to drive around, in loops forever, with people you love and people you don't. When does it end? When do you stop drinking and driving? Can you?
I guess I believe that you have to leave your hometown. Part of me is ashamed I couldn’t make it work, I feel like I didn’t fight hard enough to make my life different. I could have broken the mold and stayed around and maybe that would have been better. Could it have been?
In writing this I am thinking about twelve-year-old me, splayed on the floor of my room and dreaming about every possibility under the sun. She cannot access public transit, she sees the water only in a nearby man-made drainage pond that people go to swim in. It’s almost like freedom, with the forest right at the edge of the string of houses, so dense and large that you really could walk into it and go hundreds of kilometres before you’d come out the other end. The forest impedes the dreaming. It’s like not being able to see past your own nose.
Maybe in one of those day-dreamed possibilities was indeed an alternate reality, in which I am going to the same parties and seeing the same people over and over. Or maybe I'm at the local gym's pilates classes every week and I am overly worried about my weight. I have a good job that I will keep for 30 years and that will sustain me throughout my marriage and the early lives of my children. My friends’ lives all look identical to mine and we talk mostly about the new restaurant that opened up down the street and what cars we can buy. It feels tiring and so foreign and who am I then? I suppose I am finding something different for myself now, something that feels utopian. A different type of future. One that feels less like pretending.
(A caveat in writing this is that there is a lot that is hard to say without feeling like I would hurt someone's feelings. I had a really happy childhood. I love my joyful family very much. I had and still have very good friends from these places. But in my head it always all came back to being in my early 20s, looking around, driving down the highway and thinking shit, I’m still here?)
People always demand explanations of me for large life changes, why move, why change jobs, why pick these people, why choose the more inconvenient option? The frustrating truth for you is that I don't actually have much of a rational explanation for these things. I think the way I grew up always left me wanting something else and so I have gone in search of it. I want the pure joy. And so I have left and I know in my heart that I will leave again. In my current reality, I am not looking back.
yours,
s
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p.s. go see drinking and driving once it is at a theatre near you.