Vox Meditantis

It happened on a Friday night at the grocery store on Market Street, of all places. I was standing in the produce section wearing my old college sweatshirt – the one with the bleach stain on the sleeve – gym leggings that had seen better days, and Crocs. Actual Crocs. My hair was in a messy bun held together by what I’m pretty sure was a pen I’d grabbed from my car’s cup holder. And I was genuinely excited about the sale on brussels sprouts.

That’s when I saw her: this twenty-something woman with perfectly styled hair, wearing what looked like a carefully curated “effortless” outfit, the kind that probably took forty-five minutes and three outfit changes to achieve. She was scrolling through her phone, occasionally glancing up with that look of studied boredom that I remember perfecting myself not so long ago. And I felt… nothing. No embarrassment about my appearance. No impulse to suck in my stomach or adjust my posture. No mental catalogue of excuses for why I looked like this. Just a mild curiosity about whether she knew that the organic kale was two-for-one this week.

I grew up in New Corinth, in one of those tree-lined neighborhoods near Minerva Heights where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Being cool meant everything back then – the right clothes, the right music, the right amount of disaffected attitude toward our city’s crumbling downtown and its reputation as Wilmington’s scrappier little sibling. I spent my teens and twenties carefully calibrating my image, trying to project sophistication while living in a place most people from Philadelphia or Baltimore had never heard of.

After college, I moved back here because my mom needed help and the rent was something I could actually afford on a social worker’s salary. I told myself it was temporary, that I’d leave as soon as I saved enough money, as soon as something better came along. But something shifted over the past few years. Maybe it started during the pandemic, when we all had to confront what actually mattered. Or maybe it was the accumulation of small moments: volunteering at the food pantry at Mount Olive Baptist and seeing people show up in their work clothes, their exhaustion, their humanity. Working with families in the Riverside District who were being pushed out by gentrification, trying to help them with systems that felt designed to defeat them.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped performing. I started going to the New Corinth Community Centre for their yoga classes, not because yoga is trendy, but because my back hurts from sitting at a desk all day and it’s five dollars. I started eating at the soul food place on the corner because their mac and cheese tastes like a warm hug, not because it’s Instagram-worthy. I joined a community garden plot near Minerva Creek where we grow vegetables and everyone shows up in their grubbiest clothes and nobody cares.

Standing in that grocery store, brussels sprouts in hand, I realised that the energy I used to spend on being cool now goes toward things that actually fill me up: coaching basketball for the Youth Athletic Association on weekends, arguing with my landlord about getting the heat fixed, attending city council meetings about the riverfront development because I care what happens to this place. I have opinions about property taxes and school funding. I know my neighbors’ names. I own a crockpot and I use it weekly.

The irony is that twenty-five-year-old me would have found thirty-one-year-old me mortifying. But thirty-one-year-old me is too tired and too busy and, honestly, too content to care. I’ve learned that New Corinth, for all its problems – and there are many – has something that cool cities often lack: it’s real. People here show up for each other, not for the aesthetic. And I’ve learned that I’d rather be authentic in my bleach-stained sweatshirt than cool in someone else’s idea of who I should be.

I bought those brussels sprouts, drove home in my thirteen-year-old Honda, and roasted them with garlic for dinner while watching a reality show I would have been embarrassed to admit I liked a decade ago. And it was perfect.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.