Doing a bit of character building; it seems I am my protagonist.

The city and its bright lights had been all she had hoped it could be. After a life sequestered in suburbuia, living in small towns that were suffocating in their communualness, after attempting time and again to explain to her family what it was about the city that called her, she had finally given up, disobeyed family injuctions, and left. The centrality of her upbringing gave her a stability many who had grown up in proximity to cities lacked. Rather than living in a part of a hub she had always been so far separate that cities merely meant looped interstates surrounded by shopping malls and plazas, with the occasional school sponsored foray into museums and art.
The way that a city breathed and lived, the fact that it existed on concrete as an actual entity with a type of mass-consciousness reflected in its structure and inhabitants, that was what she wanted. Not the dull, sleeping awareness one found in suburbuia, where you didn’t talk to your neighbors and the time you spent mowing your lawn was the only time you spent in sun; that terrified her.
To do as the family asked, to marry, and produce the grandchildren, a respectable number only. To follow up those children with a mortgage to be able to host family thanksgivings and christmases without shame, that ring on her finger, telling them all that she lived life in a proper order: first a long term, at least two to three year dating period, wherein he came to family functions and impressed them all with his job, his connections, his good haircut. Next came a year or two of engagement, with all of the requisite joking and story-telling and wedding preparations. Then a Christian, family-oriented wedding with the white dress, the bridesmaids, the little cousin as a flower-girl, and the whole family present.
To follow, perhaps, a series of apartments with him as they built their fortunes and moved up in companies and changed cities, only to settle neatly into suburbia not far from the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. There would be the mortgage, the cubicle, the 9 to 5 with standard-length weekends and monotony. Then, and only then, with stability assured, children, preferably two or three, neatly spaced no less than two years apart. This was what they wanted for her; this was the dream future they imagined for her, the assurance of a humdrum life of boredom dedicated to following cable tv and not rocking the boat.
No one understood how that was death to her; that she would sooner die in flames in a forty car pile up on I-80/94 than live that life. They encouraged her to be happy in her job; told her that it was essential that she enjoyed her work; but then disapproved when she chose subject matter to study in university that they didn’t consider practical or useful. She had choice, oh yes, plenty of choice, as long as she could study a profession – pharmacist, architect, accountant – and marry a man who was white.
It was that crushing sense of expectation, of the need to never fail her family that in the end drove her away. It hurt her too much, it caused her a crushing amount of pain. The constant knowledge that she, in doing what made her happy, had failed her family haunted her days and nights. The fact that she was a disappointment no matter her what achievements because they weren’t achievements her family considered important left her empty.
It is its own type of running away, this youthful migration to cities; the excuses one makes for not attending family functions outside of weddings or funerals, the exorbitant cost of travel these days, the slow severing and weakening of ties. The steady march to a painless end to a relationship doomed to be quashed by distance. That, she had perfected. It was all about anesthesizing the part where the pain would be. She had tricks up her sleeve that she’d been using since she was 16; burned when she was 12 by the loss of friends bitter over her absence, she was much more savy by the time she left again. By her twenties she would merely smile at promises of phone calls and letters and care packages; by knowing that they would never come, or would start full force then trickle off, she deflected the pain. She knew that it was not her, that it was no fault of her own that distance killed affection, that abandonment was the deepest fear.