In Texas, I get lost.
Two lane roads open into four lane highways, and concrete consumes old pastures. Overpasses pile up like skyscrapers, and I grow restless behind the wheel of a borrowed car. Everything has changed.
I ride the freeways like a foreigner, holding my breath and missing my exits and circling the city until I find something familiar. Something constant.
The cemetery where my mother is buried. The houses where I grew up. The road to my Uncle’s home–as it rises and falls–on the way to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday.
I get lost in these images.
Then later, with a warm afternoon breeze on my face, the sound of cicadas send out their call in waves, like a radar. And I think, This is what it means to be home, the pull of memory: of easy conversations with my cousins, my sisters, my father, our time apart irrelevant; the feel of my grandmother’s hand in mine, her skin worn and fragile after 90 years but her spirit strong.
I carry all of this with me into the next morning as I board a plane before sunrise, hold tight each moment for several days after. For as long as I can, because I know it may be a year before I return.
Before I get lost again.