A Suburban Shrine

On dreams, dissatisfaction, and discovery.

By Elika Khosravani

Illustration by Ines Alto

This is how I remember time spent in my hometown: Crawling across a football field and listening to the crickets whistle in the weeds. Holding my breath against the mechanical Marlborian motions of my friends. Watching moths swarm in spirals beneath the floodlights. The worn knees of my jeans, the sharp sting of grass at my ankles and my bruised pride. A taxi thick with drunk laughter spilling out the windows and onto the highway. Prayers scratched into the side of a bus stop sign. Holy water trickling down my chin, purifying the stilted soil of my suburban shrine: a childish tit for tat, soaked in the damp traces of bottom-shelf communion wine.

My hometown is a universe that eats itself up, a vacated guest room that is cut and carved and contoured until it caves into itself. Nestled somewhere in Spanish suburbia, it was far too small for all the dreams I held inside my head.

In the rose bloom of adolescent fascination, I often found myself untethering from the world around me, drifting away mid-conversation into visions of some make-believe adulthood. I flirted with the thought of wading through crowds like skipping over stones in the creek behind my grandparents’ house, of stumbling home with sun-swollen shoulders, of rainstorms charging against my ribs—moments imagined so vividly they almost became memories of a life unlived. Within every parallel universe and new rabbit hole I lost myself in, a hole grew inside of me, too. Like a whirlpool of negative space, driven by a deep disdain for my hometown and an even greater anticipation of what was to come. I tried to satiate this hunger—not exactly with, but through: affection, attention, Blues, circadian rhythm neglect, dive bars, East Village tarot readers, hand-rolled cigarettes, love letters, poetry, psychedelics, sex, sweat, tears, Zamrock. Nothing did the trick; and even here, now, in “what was to come,” I am writhing in limitation. Time slinks by, humming an adamant tune, tapping its claws on its know-it-all watch: It will carry on and I must follow along. 

Every summer, I return home. And during the summer, an ache returns slowly to my ribs. I grow sluggish with hope and apathy. The world spins more slowly in the heat. In June, I only crave snow and sleet. I want a glacial dissolution, so quiet and earnest that even solstitial deities cannot bear it. But it is still summer and the air is hot and heavy and the skin under my bra straps feels taut and I know tomorrow I will be sunburnt. I wait for the sunlight to split my lungs open. The sky is endlessly blue, so wide it could be a grotto, and I am somewhere inside it, lost. So I dream, and dream, and dream, and keep dreaming. But this time, my dream sheds its smoke-stained skin and asks for another chance. A hometown heatstroke strikes the promise of rebirth into my heart. Heat-dazed eyes linger longer on every sidewalk, sleepy street lights shedding light on everything I grew up hating.

Now, I am back here, but the disdain is somehow subdued, softened by a recognition of the buried wonders this place has always held, a legion of lessons I was too restless to recognize before. And with every lesson unearthed, I loop a golden thread from my town's center to my soul. I preach, but only the pavement listens, like an anchor that no longer ails me but points the way home. I used to think this town was hollow, but it turns out it was filled with small gospels I was too unperceptive to name, things I now know to be true, like:

I. Hearing someone say your name for the first time is a gift; how their tongue wraps around the consonants, finding their footing around the syllables. Treasure it. 

II. Lay your head on your grandmother’s stomach and feel the rise and fall of her breathing. 

III. Make a wish each time you turn your necklace’s clasp from front to back.

IV. Turn every desire into ambition. 

V. Leap from a cliff with the lake still far below, and savour the infinity of falling—the head rush as you slice through the watery stillness.

VI. Seduce a stranger and then cry the entire walk back home. 

VII. Cut your own hair and regret it instantly. Let your friend fix it over her bathroom sink, three beers in. Listen to the steady snip of her scissors, the hum of a broken radio, the birdsong on her windowsill.

VIII. Sit on the shower floor until the water goes cold, until your fingers feel numb. 

IX. Memorize your brother’s phone number. 

X. When the summer returns, as it always does, go everywhere. Go nowhere. Go home. Sit on the broken porch swing and remember there is truth in everything you write.