I tore into Texas at 12:59 in the afternoon on October 7th, 2005. The high that day was 91 degrees, and the max dewpoint was 77; my lucky number twice over. I was meant to be here.

    Growing up, my family went all around Texas. My uncle was a ranch worker, and sometimes we would get to spend a few nights wherever he had found a job. Being from Houston, these trips showed me things I could never see at home: stars, for one. I was obsessed with the idea that stars preferred the quiet, and saved their company for pastures and gentle animals. My aunt used to lay in the grass with me and point out constellations, explaining what they meant while she traced her finger over the sky. 

    Eventually, we stopped going to ranches. My great-grandmother passed away and left us her little farmhouse on a big, yellowing pasture in Omaha, Texas - this became where we would go to forget Houston for a little while. All my cousins would pile together to sleep anywhere our bodies would fit: some on the grainy floor, one on the couch, a few on the mattress haphazardly stuffed in the living room. We’d push each other on the tire swing, sit at the kitchen table and eat microwavable sausage biscuits, press our ears against screen doors. My aunt would walk me down to the creek, tell me stories about when my great-grandmother was alive. We went outside almost every evening, sitting around an orange glow marking my father’s success at teaching me how to feed a fire. He also helped me plant tomatoes and bluebonnets, the hot sun drawing our sweat into the dirt. 

    There was a barn, too. It was entirely empty except for a rusty yellow tractor. My dad drove it over the grass every day, sometimes with me or one of my brothers on his lap so we could see all the way to the breaking of the horizon. I remember looking down at the churning body of it from the seat, listening to it scream slowly through the air and wondering what would happen if I threw myself into it. Would it eat me alive? If an object is inanimate, can it really be cruel?

    If a person feels inanimate, how does one come alive? I found the answer in ranches, farms, tractors, tire swings, bluebonnets, splintered porch swings, dirt beneath my nails, and all the Westerns my grandfather fell asleep watching. My small eyes learned to run smoothly over every West Texas hill and North Texas pasture, charting my heartbeats inside chain link diamonds and pineywoods. My memories twist gently into each other, swaths of yellow and blue and green shooting streaks into each other on a paint palette / the back of my hand. May I die on that farm, may my ashes be settled into the barn’s century-old foundation. Like Tanya Tucker said: if Heaven ain’t like Texas, I don’t want to go.