Dueling Orbits Over I-76
By: Lucia Giordano
Tags: Personal Growth, Personal Essay, Growing Up, Coming Of Age, Young Adulthood

According to astrophysics, the gravitational field of a black hole is so strong that not even light can escape from it. This boundary is called the event horizon, beyond which the escape velocity from the black hole is greater than the speed of light. To an outside observer, a black hole can never be seen. An object can never actually be seen crossing the event horizon; it will just seem to go more and more slowly and become more and more redshifted until it simply fades out of view. But the event horizon of a black hole is a theoretical boundary — if it were possible for someone to fall through an event horizon and survive, they would pass through it in a finite amount of time, and they wouldn’t see or feel anything different as they did so. But they would never make it back out.

My former high school will be stardust soon, once they get around to knocking it down. But when I was a teenager, we used to walk across the trolley tracks over lunch break during band camp to buy snacks at the ancient Wawa, the one that looks like every other Wawa built before they started putting gas stations in them. Before it was a Wawa it was a gas station, and before that was so long ago that nobody cares to remember. There’s the parking lot behind it, where the teens used to go to smoke before they got busted, where the middle school bike gang used to spend summer vacation, riding in circles on the hot pavement.

Saxer Avenue was always Springfield’s Main Street, or at least it felt that way when we were sixteen with ten dollars in lunch money from our parents’ wallets clutched tight in our sweaty palms. At first glance, it mostly hasn’t changed, but now every December they light a big Christmas tree outside the old schoolhouse, and every spring there’s a festival in the park beside the library. On some summer nights they close off the road, and the local restaurants set up tables and chairs out in the middle of the avenue for dinner under the broiling Pennsylvania sun. The empty storefronts have been remodeled by out-of-towners with hipster restaurants and modern bars. Where there were once unnavigable parking spots there are now patches of grass with skinny green trees that hug the crosswalks. The street is a palimpsest of itself, a compendium of years-old afterimages rather than something reborn; little changes in a day, but every few years the Earth shifts on its axis, unnoticed unless you choose to measure it.

The suburbs have a bad reputation, something that gets reinforced by edgy teen dramas and Arcade Fire albums. I don’t hate my hometown; Springfield is a quiet Philly suburb with good schools and good people and memories that I hold dear. It doesn’t feel like a prison, but it does feel like a place that I outgrew. When I visit, the person I have become is squeezed into the mold of my younger self, like a hermit crab that’s grown too big for its old shell.

When I left home, it was not out of animosity, but out of a need to prove that I could do it. My hometown is not an inescapable void, but its gravitational pull is strong. I could return any time I wanted. But if I didn’t leave then, I knew I never would. Like so many who came before me, I would get swallowed by suburbia, without ever realizing I’d passed the point of no return.