Early April in Houston
All I’m saying is that it started raining the day I left. Not that there was a connection. Just that for the four days I visited, the sun was out––aggressively. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no stage fright. Just unabashed ultraviolet. Take one look at my brother, at his pale skin dip-dyed a diluted pink, and you know: the sun was fucking out. Then I left––or really, I got ready to leave––and a biblical storm started to creep in again, like it did six months ago, and six weeks before that, and the year before that. From my apartment window, I could see thick clouds migrating towards us, its own sort of air pollution. My city is hydrophilic. A plant perpetually in need of water, entirely ambivalent about whether or not its residents can swim. Houston is, at times, a merciless place; and yet, we stay.
My mother grew up around the corner in a red brick house with a navy door. Thirty years on Milford Street. It was there that she learned how to be who she was: radiant and funny, an at-times painfully archetypal American teenager; she learned how to hide her diaries, how to artfully disperse smoke from a crumbling joint, how to drive an old mail Jeep to and from cheerleading practice. Her mother was a Francophile from the Mississippi Delta, her father a lawyer rooted in the traditions of the city. Her brother was an artist, slow to speak and quick to anger. One time, Robert made a replica of himself out of newspaper, dressed it in his own clothes, and threw it from a tree onto passing cars below. The psychological implications of this are still to be determined.
Houston is a monstrous sprawl, an exquisite corpse of buildings and parks and patchworks of museums: sunken pieces of culture waiting to be excavated. It is a place built on bayous, thick with mosquitos. I’m not sure if I would ever call it pretty, its form erratic, its construction never over. But it is beautiful. On Sunday I sat in the park with my mom and older brother, watching as a couple struggled to coordinate a photo of their twin girls, about three years old, wearing matching Easter outfits and wide-brimmed hats. Nearby, siblings played a game with a football, calling out a different word with every throw, switching between English and Spanish; I watched for a while, but never quite figured out the rules. Someone was grilling; the smoke bled into the sunshine as we walked back to our apartment. The honeysuckles were blooming; a man with a wide gash across his face told us to enjoy the rest of our day; my dog’s tongue lolled out of her mouth, greedy for oxygen, or water, or both.
Earlier in the weekend, my brother Michael was driving us back from lunch; his beat-up Jeep turned the corner, continuing on down an achingly familiar street, threateningly close to where our house of twenty-one years stood. Still stands. It’s strange to think about it existing without us, like a hollowed out shell of an insect, fragile chitin, gently plucked from the leaves. “Do you think you can handle it?” His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. He had said this with a playful tone, yet there was a spark of truth in his eyes––just enough to make me wonder if I actually could. I feigned dramatism and sighed. “Yeah, I think so.” And so we turned left onto Shepherd Street (not Shepherd Drive––that came deeper in the city) and then swung a right onto Quenby. 2133 looked as it always had, the only difference being that the last time I was in Houston, that white house with navy shutters had been my home. I often imagine myself as an adult, driving past just as I had done with my brother, pointing to the different windows like puppet shows, silhouettes behind each, memories waiting.
The night before I went off to school, my mom took me by my shoulders and steered me into each room. Through tears and hyperventilations, I recounted my favorite memories––still very much present in these spaces. As they spilled out of my mouth, these times and anecdotes grew to mythic proportions, taking up physical space within each room. I stood at each door frame, timid and reverent, not wanting to invade or disturb what had suddenly become so fragile.
We had painted over the walls so many times, smoothing out scuffs and scrapes, hiding the spot where my brother spilled chocolate soy milk all over the wall. I had already peeled off posters, the hundreds of photos I had taped to the wall, including one of John F. Kennedy’s handsome grandson that watched over me with the steady, reliable charm of his family dynasty as I did my homework. I knew that the inside of my drawers were going to be painted over––soon forgotten would be all of the names of all of the ants that died during my brief stint as an ant farmer. Margaret, Theresa, Rosa. Why they were all Catholic, I’m not sure––maybe out of an ingrained anxiety to save their formicidae souls.
On the drive to the airport this morning, my mom and I stopped at a stoplight near the freeway. By the underpass, a man sat at a desk. No walls to hold him, no clear business to conduct. Two dogs loped around, playing with stuffed animals scattered about the concrete median. The man stayed at the desk, reclined in his chair, overseeing all that unfolded beneath the humming of the freeway. “I guess he works from home,” my mom said. I laughed, knowing I shouldn’t. Houston isn’t always forgiving. I wonder if the rain has started.