The Three One Seven

As a teen, I thought Indianapolis would be the place to escape myself, but when I grew up, Indianapolis changed me in ways I couldn’t fathom. I had yet to learn that the winds of life carry one across canyons of the unknown. This city has both been the familiar and the foreign for me.

I grew up in a small town about 40 miles northwest of Indianapolis. Coming from a rural community with no stoplights, it was hard to imagine what it was like to live in Indy on a day-to-day basis. Yet now I feel like so many parts of Indianapolis are at home in my heart.

I remember standing in the middle of the downtown circle and eating chocolates in the chocolate shop with friends on a high school field trip. I remember when I visited Broad Ripple a few years later where a friend and I ate some vegan Asian-inspired tacos in a restaurant with no chairs. I can reminisce back to when I went to Masjid al-Mumineen and they taught me the gift of giving back to the greater community.

Unfortunately, I also know Indianapolis to be a place of immense soul-sucking loneliness. It is a city that pulls you in with whispers of opportunity, but the people can be so cold. It is a place where dreams can die as soon as they start and nobody will even blink. Life is hard and the people must be tough to survive.

Indianapolis can be so beautiful and yet vastly unwelcoming. I will return again and again nonetheless. This Midwestern concrete landscape is a part of me, whether I want it to be or not. Many Hoosiers seem to treat Indiana as an in-between place - a place where many hope to outgrow to drift toward greener pastures elsewhere. Our pastures are already so green if people would just look around them.