The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

It sounds a silly thing to say—after all, I had not been gone so long—but readjusting to America was more challenging than I had anticipated. I was struck by how sparkly and new everything seemed, by the cars gleaming their bright, artificial colors like saliva-slicked sweets, by the sheer volume and inventiveness of clothing everyone seemed to wear: brogues and hats and suspenders and belts and handbags and clinking bracelets and bouncing strands of pearls—a whole language of sartorial excess when only a pouch and a length of fabric would have sufficed. And I marveled too at how stark, how denuded of plant life, the cities were, just one gray block after another, and where there would have been trees there were instead mouse-colored buildings spilling silent people, all in their layers and layers of elaborate and superfluous costumery.