I returned to Lubbock in the evening. Lubbock at this time of year can be pretty –– serene in that country churchyard sort of way. The fields are green again with new growth, and by May they will be waving in the southwestern breeze. The skies were that forlorn kind of blue, mottled here and there with white, high cirrus, some like painterly daubs against the background of blue, others like grooved swirls of austere, frigid white, and all of it looked pretty when sunset came, an hour early. The ride back to campus on the airport shuttle was long and bumpy, and I swayed with the traffic, back and forth, back and forth, almost being lulled to sleep in the process.
I dreaded flying back. The flights were almost full, end to end, row to row, from Harlingen to Houston to here. My resentment of flying was only made worse by seeing row after row of self-important, self-aggrandizing business travelers with their quaint cell phones and their PDAs, and their attitudes, and their condescensions. I didn’t want to go back. I kept on imagining my mother, waiting there, her brown purse on her white sweatered arm. I just wanted to run back down the stairs of separating the boarding area and the waiting area and hug her again. I kept on looking back over my shoulder to see where she was. But after twenty minutes standing in line in the security queue she left, and I could see her walk out, and the tears started welling up and stinging my eyes. I remember when I was five years old and I could run to her for everything, whether it scared or fascinated me. And after all this time growing up and getting big and being an adult, I still want to run to her and fold myself into her.
On the plane my hands shook. I don’t like flying on planes, and unfamiliar people scare me. I tend to sit towards the very back so I don’t bother anyone with my presence. Every time I fly, I think about updating this journal, but in recent months I haven’t been able to. So many things have happened, both good and bad. I cannot count them on my fingers or on my toes. I can only count them in vague remembrances that my mental life consists of. So many names! So many faces! So many passing occurrences, now remembered, now forgotten.
It has been more than a year now since I first arrived here to this city on the Plain. I remember first arriving to it in the dark five years ago, when it was just a mass of amber colored light against the West Texas darkness. In that time, my heart has been broken many times, people have died, or moved away, or moved on. I have seen things, I have been to places. Even now, more than a month after my life-changing trip to Santa Fe, I feel as if more is stored up for me. I have rode this raft on an ocean of tears, and it has taken me far and wide to distant and exotic shores. I have withstood the blows of this world; I have survived now. And now it seems that Lubbock –even Texas in general– no longer seem suitable for fostering the spiritual and intellectual growth I have so far wanted in my life.
In that hotel room off of Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe — it was dim and cold and it was snowing — I wrung out the last of my frustrations in a tear stained rant against everything I was. I hate my body. I hate my poverty. I hate my arrogance, my pride. I hate that thing which makes me hate others. I hate the loneliness, the dejection, the outright misunderstanding. I have pushed everyone I know away, and the stragglers just linger on with curiosity. Some watch and wait until I produce my own demise, others hang on knowing better. I am like a bomb going off in the desert; I consume everything in my path, and become a spectacle. My poisonous influence hangs on for a long time, and I am like the dust of the field.
Who knows where I’ll be this time next year? I don’t know. I wish I could foretell the future. But I can’t. I just wait for things to happen, and then act reflexively. Schoolwork has lost alot of its meaning. I began taking the last bits of my cultural anthropology classes with a certain Dr. Harris. She’s a good teacher but she is cold. She’s cold because that’s what she’s learned. She’s not cold to me when I talk to her outside of class. I have her now for my Ethnography course. But everything I have learned in that class is not really of note — sure, it bears theoretical importance, Malinowski and Boas and Geertz — but I feel like the theory is the most important thing for her, not the people one works with. Last semester I worked with a real son-of-a-bitch in Ethnomusicology, who bullied me into doing my work. I know this sounds unfair, but he did. Too often professors do these things to their students. There was one day I was so overwhelmed with work and school I literally collapsed outside of my door. I just didn’t have enough strength in me to continue doing what I needed to complete. And it wasn’t like my roommate, Steven, would do anything to help. Living with him has become so tedious, so annoying that there are times where I literally cannot complete my schoolwork because he is here, in this room. Twice he has brought in his atrocious girlfriend (she is from Belarus) and they have taken the pleasures of Venus in my presence. I feel like I can’t criticize or say anything, because he usually tends to attack me by asking circular questions, things like “how can you expect me to respect you when you can’t even respect yourself?” or “why do you have to lack integrity? if you had more integrity we’d be able to get along more”. And I honestly don’t care. He’s lonely and he wants to have friends. I can’t blame him for that. But we are two different people. We have differing interests. We couldn’t possibly, if ever, have anything in common except for our place here within this dwelling. I can’t stand him. All the while on the plane I dreaded seeing him, or his girlfriend, the messy room. This has been the source of all my worries, because if I can’t sleep I can’t make good grades and if I can’t make good grades I can’t graduate. I’d love to throw my things in a huge suitcase and just leave. That’s all I want to do, come back and take care of my family and work and have my old bed again. But I know that this is acceding to defeat and that is not what I originally intended when I came to this great institution.
I realize now that I’ve made changes in my life that it’s so much better just to be yourself. Compared to other people I am just a normal person with normal problems. Things haven’t gone disastrously. No great catastrophes yet, as my old friend Seth used to say. I still want to be the bodybuilder I’ve always wanted to be. And I want to be a better human being. I want to escape this death march of college, and get out before it consumes me alive. I don’t want to be another drone in an office complex somewhere. I want to taste of the ambrosia of a living culture, to breathe its air, to drink its waters and suck on its sweet nectars. I want the air to be filled with foreign constellations and the smell of clove and jackfruit. I want to visit Brazil and do my fieldwork. No more Steven Gateses, no more Chris Mielkes, nothing like that. I will finally exorcize the demon of the American insular persepective (“me, me, me; I want, I want, I want”) forever, and it will never darken my doorway again.
I will live. I will seek out those fountains, like I sought out waters and earth in Chimayó, and in empty square of Mesilla, New Mexico. I will find myself in my body, once I remove all this bullshit existence, and reclaim the glories and crowns that are awaiting me.
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