Truth be told, I just want to go home. This Texas thing isn't quite all the rage. Lots of shopping out here. Pretty houses and pretty cars. No poetry readings. No open mic nights at a family owned and operated cafe where the air blows in every time someone opens the door, and even though it's cold, you cozy up to your warm mug of chocolate and pull your jacket a little tighter and stay put. It's all Starbucks and Macy's out here. Designer flip flops in the rain. I can get Mexican food, but not at a taqueria. I have to sit down at a restaurant with their silver forks and spoons, a green linen napkin and be served. No soccer for women. Actually, there's not much recreation for anyone over 18. Up until 18, the place is kind of a playground with parks every mile, swimming pools whose slides twist and turn before spilling you out into the chlorinated water. My daughter goes nutts and after just an hour and a half, is ready to go home and be still. That's all good and fine. But no open mic nights? No taquerias? Take me home again.
I want to go home where our freeways skate in between hills that go from green to the color of sand, the color of a camels sun drenched back. The San Francisco billboards larger than life propped next to the freeway, the silhouette of a dancer with their Ipod blasting into their ears. They are listening perhaps to Rodrigo e Gabriella while strolling the headlands of the cliffs just above Ocean Beach where the concrete bones of the former sutro baths is etched on the shoreline. Suburbia, out there, mingles here and there with the city. It does not stretch on for the length of an entire city. Suburbia is the city where I now live. I live in a city of suburbs. Brick homes whose design and architecture seem to be in repeat format - one mimicking the other, except perhaps this one is turned a bit to the side, this one has an angled doorway. Like wearing a daisy on your otherwise black and white starched uniform, we are all the same - living by someone else's carefully architected design.
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this is beautifully written, kristin...
ReplyDeletemakes me sad though. we miss you out here where the freeways skate. any chance of you coming home?
Surely somewhere, somewhere in your area there is a tiny coffee shop where the owner is desperately attempting to cultivate an atmosphere poetic. I hope you will stumble across yours as I did here. Unfortunately that little poetry heaven is a fifty mile round-trip for me, so I don't go often. But what a relief, and a challenge, and a joy when I do. I'm wishing a writer/poet group for you, only closer.
ReplyDelete(And, as always, your writing is a joy to read.)