The Suburbans

We were the quintessential underdogs. Or so we fooled ourselves.

We lived the city life but lay our heads down in our suburban beds.

We worked jobs but as contractors not staffers.

We didn’t race up the corporate ladder as we rationalised that as selling out.

The land we stood on was ours not a pocket of air carved into a high-rise apartment.


But a decade into our romance with the suburbs, the national highway inched closer.

With it came the honking cacophony of traffic jams, the vibrating sounds of diesel generators and the constant chugging of overworked machines.

The noise left me wide eyed at night staring at the ceiling.

And then the fighting voices in my head would take over.

The city had spread its tentacles into our haven.

The once farmlands where our row house stood, as if in an English county boasting of a colonial hangover, had been connected to the toll road.

The metro had shot up the land prices but we were moaning the bursting of our bubble.


The night never slid in total blackness anymore, the grey filter had taken over.

The dispersed multi-coloured lights of the mall dimmed even the stars.

Conversations with the dead became tougher to navigate without these markers to space.

On moonless nights sometimes Venus would manage to travel through the layers of smog to make itself seen and I would see it as a sign.

The dystopian tomorrow had reared its ugly head into my today.

And reality began to feel like a construct of my brain fog.