Exit Signs Lead Nowhere

The city, merely made out of roads, was internationally recognized for its rat traps: a symbol of its own designer clutter. The boy wasn’t new to the city, but everything in it felt new to him. The city, like any other, had many facets. One, emulated by livelihood, was framed by its many lakes and trees, large malls and squirrels all around—an image of nature and of the suburbs. All that parking lot space, however, separated him from any real human interaction, an absence made tangible by the empty, vacant cars. 

His boyfriend lived Downtown. So green yet so gray, it allowed him to walk. Past the homeless, up to buy cigarettes, or stomp through sidewalks that held no meaning but to perpetuate the daily grind. When he quit smoking, for a week, he ran—an act of service, a week of seeing the motion blur from outside the car. The eternal pause, while running by pieces of a city that promised a new beginning, but only mirrored the same codes he once knew in his hometown. Thomson Park, College Garden, The Cheese District.

The Cheese District! 8.976 feet away from Downtown, summed up a 25 minute run. The district, named after a dairy farm established in 1925, sat across from an Italian deli right around the corner, where he got his second job in America. The mother of the family who ran the place, an Italian immigrant, moved from Italy to Jersey in 1972 and somewhere along the lines, she ended up in that very sunny city, a place as far removed from her origins as the cheese district was from its own.

U$14.00 an hour. 

A wage not for labour, but for time. No previous experience; so long as able to learn how to use the slicer. Unfit for the job in the most literal sense, yet unwilling to let even digestion dictate his belonging. Not as far removed as he thought, as the family familiarly ended up feeling like packed sardines in a crushed tin box. Soon, magnolia leaves covered the sidewalks brown alongside cigarette butts and doubt. Indeed, all familiarly familiar.

The place where he grew up was fairly big. A place where identity is as much shaped by its self-proclaimed sophistication as by its pseudo-cold temperatures. And like in America, you wouldn't get far there without a car. People commute, not as members of the city, but rather as their projection of something seemingly sumptuous. 

Drive to the park.

Walk past the homeless.

Drive back home. 

The car was more than just a way to get around, but a badge of middle-class stability. Certain types of people had cars: their ownership affirming their place. Others, relegated to motorcycles or nothing at all, were marked as peripheral, excluded from the bigger narrative altogether.

The ideology of his upbringing revolved around the coded stability of affluence — a pre-determined path where money served not just as prosperity but as the structuring absence. They didn’t walk. Walking was an archaic signifier, erased by the predetermined trajectories their parents sculpted for them. Work, too, was a phantom — a theoretical construct defined to an order of signs beneath their reality, one designed to preserve the illusion that their children, like themselves, would never walk. 

In this symbolic economy, he was liberated from thinking about money, not because of abundance, but because they existed in a system that made its absence feel natural. Walking and labour — these became ideologies of a world they observed but never inhabited. 

A deli, for instance, was an interface: a place they consumed but never embodied. As a child, I remember our family buying prosciutto and mortadella from this local Italian place every other week. And also, the annoyance in my father’s eye when the cut wasn’t paper thin, as to blame the employer who could never do a proper job. The slicing of prosciutto, then, was not a task but a show. An invisible trade that separated the consumer from the laborer.

The pyramid of mobility, was not a hierarchy but a map. Whether by foot, by car, or by privilege, one's way to move became a code, a cipher of belonging. Uniforms, private tutors, tuition-free paths — all these signs operated as markers of distinction, building an identity not through what they were but through what they excluded. The irony, of course, lay in the proud father who could aestheticize labor as noble so long as it was distant, as if slicing prosciutto could only gain dignity when performed outside of the backyards he grew so close to.

Now, far away from the bricked roads, he holds a cigarette in his hands. Freed from labour and able to drive again, he was back inside that pyramid he ran away from. Under his father’s roof, he caught himself dreaming. Dreaming of familiarity, dreaming of making U$14,00 an hour, dreaming that one day he would be perceived as something other than an impostor in his own life.