Title: My Little Texas
Written In: 2022
Publication: Excerpts released in Black Hearts, Black Voices II album by Fifth Wall Performing Arts. Listen here
Excerpts:
I suppose I keep returning to Texas.
Texas where you’d pass a ranch or two on the way to church or school, and it’d be just as thrilling as passing a convenience store. And not the kind of store with gleaming lights and twenty different smoothie flavors enticing your entry, regardless of your need for something new and disposable. But the store that just wished to disappear into its polluted landscape. Barely a tree in sight. Only the structures and their neglected grassy lawns. Or at least, the ones I remember were neglected.
Some ranches were functional, but the ones that stick in my mind were always carcasses. Something you might’ve wondered about for two seconds on your commute before flying into a spaghetti of traffic. Leaving behind what could’ve been a prosperous green sanctuary in order to enter a world of grayness and graffitied concrete.
It’s funny—I don’t remember previously giving this area much thought, but now, it rings so poignantly. Something left behind.
Perhaps, these ranches that disrupt my thoughts were never meant to succeed as they do in my nostalgic fantasies. My optimism seems to be one of the few things I salvaged from my childhood. The one thing I could hold onto. That which could push a bubble around me, rendering all the noise, attempting to rob ownership of my body, dull mumblings— incomprehensible.
***
There were countless times in elementary and middle school when I laid awake at night staring at the ceiling and just wishing I could be whisked away. I used to pretend with this Max Steel action figure I had (basically think of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible). I told everyone I liked to make up action stories around him, but at night, he was just mine. My prince. I lay with him next to me, wishing I had a real man to hold me.
I wish I could take it back. That that part of my life had just never existed—wiped from the scrapbooks of my memory. But that was me. I needed someone. Anyone. Who just understood what it felt like. Because all I had were movies.
And movies were just that, right? Once the credits rolled, it was back to the real world. The real world where you learned to be quiet and not sing aloud, especially songs about love and dreams. The real world where people started asking questions if all your drawings were of girls (because that’s who you related with). The real world where every day was an experiment of what pieces of your true self you could reveal and what could be received and accepted. And some days, you just needed to fit in (even if it meant pretending).
After kissing my elementary school crush, I came home and told my parents everything. How I was filled with butterflies and could still taste her cherry-flavored lip gloss. How I even did it with tongue. I felt I had reached a rite of passage. Now, I could be like everyone else.
I was grounded. For the next two weeks. Turns out kissing a girl before you’re 10 years old is not acceptable.
***
One other widely-held belief, noted by W.F. Strong, is that a real Texan doesn’t put beans in chili. “This one is actually absolutely correct. You can put beans in chili if you want to, but you cannot then legitimately call it Texas chili. You don’t mess with Texas and you don’t mess with Texas chili.”4
I gave up most meat and became a pescatarian in 2014. Beans became a large source of my protein. Coincidentally, it was the same year I last visited Texas since moving to Georgia. I guess I’m not a Texan anymore. That citizenship just got revoked.
So, what does that mean for my memories? Was I a Texan in 2010, the year I moved, but not after? Or was I never a Texan to begin with? Maybe you had to be cradled in by generations of “Texans”5 in order to fully claim that name. And my parents were Midwesterners. They barely knew to say “Yee-haw!”