June 17, 2024
despite being located approximately three and a half hours north of my location, it feels as if my hometown exists on another plane, neither quite physically in the same state and mentally behind a fog. since it is logically still there, i returned home for fathers’ day, the first time since my grandfather’s passing in early january. on my first full day in town i woke up and ran the connector trail the city build while i was away, traversing the railway lines i used to take home from school behind the formerly-condemned apartments (now luxury yuppie housing), connecting with the downtown trail i first rode a bike on, all the way to and around the american airlines center, passing the 7/11 my friends and i used to skate to on warm summer nights. there’s a scar on my left arm where inertia once got the better of me while on a longboard and it hurts more than usual.
later during the visit dallas began to take on a dreamlike quality. much of my pre-covid life had been marked by disassociation. then, it was not as if i were in my body but rather watching above it in the hum of the transmission wires. it started to seep in again from under the floorboards. each store we passed while walking down bishop avenue was both itself and all versions thereof, laden with memory. while talking to my brother about dostoyevsky, i was also talking to my first girlfriend about existentialism, simultaneously outside joking with my best friend from middle school about healing crystals while at a street fair. later, i was standing in front of a matisse painting while i exercised my newfound high school independence by visiting a museum with friends. outside, i had just escaped by last day of middle school and was running down the newly-built klyde warren park. the memories of the city a heaven resting on my shoulders.
i got to the home where i spent the first nineteen years of my life as my knees buckled. a place of respite. the gum tree outside towering over us as it was when i was brought home from the hospital at the turn of the century by way of a bright red spitfire which later caught on fire while i was in it. walking in the door i saw my parents telling my brother and i about their pending divorce. i was crawling on the ground, my leg immobilized from where skin, fat, and muscle had separated on the edge of a license plate. further back in the room i played with my friends at a sleepover and lan party. in the backyard i was building my dad a garden for father’s day, painting green vines into the standing posts, as i cried in the restroom cleaning blood off of my clothes after (redacted). back in my brother’s room (formerly ours) i eavesdropped on a call informing my dad about my great-grandmother’s death over the night. so it goes. the ambient hum of memory like a cicada brood emerging from the soil.
i had to leave. the air of the city unbearably thick with artifacts, ghosts of people still alive but no longer there (and some dead, too), a lurking absence in the corner of my vision which i was not prepared to face. possibly all places end like this? i do not understand how people can live in the same place their entire lives if this is what it approaches, a growing flashback until every surface is buried under the dust of memory. it could be that i irreparably broke some thread of destiny; a ghost of potentiality too haunting my shoulder at the moment i left my past self. there exists a discontinuity in my life which dallas could be a reminder of. this could all be medical dramatism too. while home i was informed that i have low blood pressure. funnily enough the opposite tends to plague my family. right after walking around (and an eleven-mile run before that), i clocked in at 86/55. allegedly one of the symptoms of this is confusion and lightheadedness; this was certainly similar. as i drove back to houston i bought a large pickle and drank the juice straight out of the bag while going eighty miles per hour on 75 before chugging a 275 mg caffeine energy drink crossing the county line and everything returned to its proper chronological order.