Here's My Story

I am a Metro Miami resident who just graduated (this year) from a suburban high school in Car World. For the past thirteen years, I’ve been living in a quaint house in the suburbs, about a thirty minute car ride from anything (seriously) urban. That means few pedestrians, little noise, no tall apartment buildings, no subway stations, few if any laundromats, no bike racks, and so on. There are advantages and disadvantages to this life style. I have a large garden in which I can run around and a swimming pool, so I can splash around with friends and family in the summer months. Also, I never have trouble sleeping at night due to disruptive neighbors. 

At the same time, my ears always perk up when I hear the loud drone of an engine which I think belongs to a bus. Much to my disappointment, each time I look out the window, it is a garbage truck, rolling past the corner of my street. When I was thirteen or fourteen, my parents had to drive me to a mall fifteen minutes away so that I could have some low key teenage fun interacting with other suburban kids. If I desired any form of social interaction, it depended on my parents’ schedules. Even when I just wanted to go biking around my neighborhood with a friend, I could forget about it; my friends’ mothers were not willing to let their child run around the suburbs supposedly filled with kidnappers and molesters. (They didn’t even use the number of speeding garbage trucks as an excuse.)

Without a driver’s license, I felt like the main character from Stephen King’s Misery, who sat with both of his legs broken in bed in a remote Colorado home during the winter. But how could this be? I live in Miami—a city people all over the world dream of visiting. It is home to America’s best beaches, hottest hang outs, and of course sunny, warm weather year-round. However, those areas were always inaccessible for me, even as a sixteen- year- old. Parental paranoia (my friend’s parents) and highways stood in my way.