12 Ways To Know If You’re From The Suburbs

1. You call apartments “houses.” Come to my house tonight. Please come. We’ll sit on an L-shaped sofa under a thousand throw blankets and listen to nothing but the refrigerator.

2. You still remember that kid with the finished basement. You still remember using the exercise equipment down there, drunk on the elliptical when the world was one long driveway. Damn those kids with finished basements.

3. You know trees. The thick tree that was kind of bifurcated at the base. The tree you hid behind with water balloons once. The tree that taught you how autumn happens. The tree whose huge ass roots you threw up on; Peachtree Schnapps. The tree that scratched your left shoulder blade as a girl named Deena put her hands on your shorts.

4. You do very well in small groups. A Persian rug; six clocks; a few hundred DVDs and a television as big as a spaceship. Go.

5. You’ve had some of your best conversations in parked cars.

6. You feel a kind of lazy communion with animals. You know what it’s like to listen on a Wednesday for hours and minutes and days to little crickets doing calm little prayers.

7. You suddenly felt your balls between your legs when you got your license and waited for someone who didn’t have hers to come out of her big house. She sat next to you in your big car and you drove through a forest past three deer to another big pile of stones. You walked through another forest, and when you got inside, everyone was staring at a black square while eating pomegranate seeds in a room that looked like a cathedral.

8. You know the feeling of having too much food. Of having two entire cows in one hundred plastic bags in a refrigerator in the basement. Two cows that you will never see and never touch for two years because there is enough food in the upstairs refrigerator, and the basement meat is just for apocalypses and dinner parties.

9. There’s this whole genre of memories in which you are walking up or down stairs.

10. There was a room for your computer. It was called Computer Room. It contained a computer and thirty pounds of paper about the computer. And there was a room called Living Room in which no living ever happened.

11. You know that there is nothing like driving home from someone’s house, after midnight. Just you and the radio and the sound of the large machine you’re sitting in. Three souls, at home but not yet home.

12. You’d go to the supermarket alone sometimes, just to go. You could stay there all night, staring at the yogurt and the nut butters and the big bags of Riesen, walking up and down straight lines, below a hundred tubes of burning mercury, never knowing why most of that stuff was even there.