Texas Tulips

Preface: My Home

Imagine your favorite food is at a limited capacity. There's no food that can compare. You would, quite literally, eat it everyday for the rest of your life and fare just fine.

Imagine, you can only eat this food at certain times of the year, when the circumstances are right, when the time is right, when the price you're willing to pay for it changes everyday.

Things happen sometimes, like the plate is right in front of you, but the universe still won't give you one bite. Well, as my mother says, this is life, and life sucks.

My 'favorite food' happens to be my boyfriend. He lives over a thousand miles away, in West Texas. The land of heat, in so many ways. Heat from the blistering, merciless sun. Heat from the Mexican food consumed by his family on a daily basis. ( When in Rome, do as the Romans do.) Heat from our bodies, as closely intertwined as possible- we only see each other once in a blue moon. His hometown, Midland, is flat like the surface of a table. There aren't many trees, but small bushes and some cacti. A man on my flight to MAF told me once: "If you stand in one spot and look in one direction, You can see a hundred miles. Then, all you gotta do is stand on a tuna can and you can see another hundred."

This seems strangely accurate.

In his neighborhood, The dirt is red. The roads all look the same. They run parallel, like a checker board. The siding on some houses is peeled and cracked, in a rustic and charming kind of way. Shabby- in an almost royal way. The grass is sparse in some places. There's several stations where you can stop and get water, because drinking city water is unheard of and, seemingly, disgusting. ( I've drank from the tap my whole life.) Around the same time everyday, you can hear the Food Truck a block away, playing The Entertainer. With this song comes ice cream, nachos, and cold cans of Sprite. A strange language exists around me, I cannot understand it much, but it rolls off the tongue of he and his family like a strange and beautiful song. Sometimes, I wonder if they're talking about me. The weather is fickle, but it is perfect when the wind blows. I love it most, though, because within the city limits, my home lies.

My home has brown eyes and size thirteen feet. He loves video games and is weirdly passionate about the strangest things, from what lurks miles below the ocean, to flashlights, and even to amoebic ecosystems. He hates his first name, for it is shared with His father that left him long ago. His hair grows faster than the grass of the yard you're responsible for mowing. It's curly when it gets shaggy, and is the color of ink. He is tan, and laughs at me for burning in the sun. He can't sing, but loves to blast music on portable speakers he collects. His room can't stay clean. For almost unfathomable reasons, he loves me.

How on earth did I get so lucky?