from her parents’ mansion in the suburbs to kensington— a neighborhood feverish with creativity, where mothers brought textile work home to help the household economy, where mothers recorded black-market sex tapes to help the household economy too, where kawaii-styled female gangs dealt light drugs and mothers’ sex tapes alike. meditation groups gathered in the parks. when the parks were occupied by junkies, they meditated in the street instead— a peaceful protest of sorts. susanne’s biological parents live in the same neighborhood, just a block away. susanne will never know she is exchanging greetings and small pleasantries with her mother and father. still, her eyes always linger, following the couple down the block. susanne emancipated herself at fifteen. her parents were secretly happy. susanne knew, so it was never really a secret. she has no fear of life because she was granted an incredible intuition, a near-supernatural sense of the “right direction” to go. her parents spoke an average of five sentences every four to six months. she was used to bone-chilling exchanges. the lack of love, the lack of language, was killing her intuition— and other traits it would devastate susanne to lose. susanne knows when she is on the wrong path, and she felt as much until she separated from her family and moved to kensington: for the art, for the culture, for the sheer distance from her parents’ neighborhood. kensington— universally the same, the same neighborhood of hipsters, the same borrowed cool, the same ache dressed up as freedom. i used this piece in a writing contest that worked out beautifully as i got the story i wanted despite recieving only 2 submissions. somehow, one was perfect and can be found in omg the story inscriptions section after i make minor edits.