I have lived in this town for a long time. So long, that I have probably driven its every road, passed every single person that calls it home, and been to every one of its many Subways (Four, yeah that’s right, four Subways people, and two of them are basically on the same street. Who keeps leasing space out to these people? For God sakes, can we get like one Quiznos, a Jimmy John’s. Damn).
The real point is that I’ve become too familiar with this place. Most times it isn’t a bad thing, but I often find myself passing through memories as the day goes on. No one really notices it, but I think I look around the way I do because I’m trying to see it more clearly. It’s a dumb thought I think, but sometimes it’s like seeing these ghosts. If I head south down the highway, my head doesn’t ignore the image of me and my friends crossing across the two hills to cross into Dick Kleberg Park. If I head to the local bank downtown, I can make out the image of myself watching the parade from the second floor; I remember how dark it was, how empty the building felt.
Here on campus is no different. I used to ride my bike to here, play tennis on the courts for a tournament. I remember getting ice cream in the same place the financial office currently resides (that one hurts a little. I now wait in the same line for paperwork that I used to for ice cream.
I’ve seen my childhood die in front of me in that line, and it was slow— both the line and the slaughtering of my innocence).
Every time I walk to the SUB I remember when my friend from high school showed me his stashed painkillers; knowing then that this was not going to end well for him, every step I take to the SUB a ghost reminds me that I was right.
I wonder what it will be like without these perfect illusions, the figments that march across this flat, flat land. I imagine the landscape not being so messy, but also less intimate. I think I will learn less lessons…
The people that are gone, that I will always miss, they still exist in these places: the town across the tracks, the stone edifices that blanket the landscape, the fields just outside the limits of the city, even the smaller towns that stretch out across the highway.
All of these places remind me that I don’t really think I could ever be gone from people, I just plainly still see them too often.
Despite feeling rather paralyzed here in town, I’m thankful I grew up in a place of such character. Because this place isn’t perfect, neither is the university or the King Ranch or the entire world that expands outwards past the town’s borders. But every day I feel beholden to the town that for some reason let me leave my mark; for it was those very imperfections that became the apple of my eye, that made me trust my narrative was beautiful if not at least bittersweet.
And while I believed I was made stagnant, lulled by the monotony of living in a small town, thinking that there was never going to be a way to connect to the outside world, it was its masterfully placed occupants that woke me from my own slumber.
I’ve embarrassed myself plenty in front of them, but I would go around again all the same, if I could just arrive back where I am now.
I don’t even think they realize how much they changed internally for me. Every single one of them: Crystal, Frankie, Darcy, Bobby, Plaz, Iliana, America, CR, Other Josue, Josh, Luis, Ashley, Jake, Bri, Jesse, Alex, Travis, Breedlove, Etta, Lue, Michaelina, Morris and Flores, and even Matthew Ward.
Now I find myself out of time and don’t really know how quite to explain what they all mean to me, I really don’t think I could. Yet that doesn’t really matter, because the only thing that really is rocking in the back of my head, that I worried that I may have been too passive with, is: Do they even realize how much I am going to miss all of them?