A. Headley really nails how I feel about my hometown. Just replace Houston with L-Town:
Houston isn’t real anymore. Driving down the freeways, the streets dappled with potholes, felt like taking a tour of the folds of my own unreliable brain. Houston is a sinkhole, a below-sea-level basin too flooded with memory to hold any new experiences.
When I tell people that I don’t really like living in Austin, most of them say, “Are you going to move back to Houston?” No, I tell them, because moving back to Houston would feel like moving backwards, and I’d rather move forwards.
This isn’t technically true. Since time only goes in one direction, there’s no such thing as moving backwards, not really. If I moved to Houston, I’d still be moving forwards. But it’d be like taking up residence inside my own head. Every experience I would have, every place I would go, would have cast upon it a corresponding shadow of something that already happened, or didn’t happen, depending on how reliable my memory is. “Is this happening right now?” I would ask myself as I walked into a coffeehouse or bar, “or is this happening six years ago? Or is it happening at all?”
Lafayette sucks. I can give you 5,000,000 reasons why. I’m sure you already know them though.
♥ Kelli
well, it’s not so much that it sucks – i don’t really think that myself – but that i feel just like allison: i can’t go anywhere or do anything that dosen’t already have some meaning or memory mapped over it. i wonder how my parents feel having lived there all their life…
The only thing to do in lafayette, is to get married and have kids……either you have a good job, or a crap job. And no one is acctually happy, but just content to their own ways of redundance………..some people just don’t have the fire and want to travel and do great things. Some people are just content with being content. This is why i don’t fit in here. I don’t do kids.
I’m gonna have to disagree with you, Kelli. I think people can be very happy without having the fire and wanting to travel and do great things. I think there are many different kinds of happiness, or that each person defines their own. My parents are very happy in Lafayette, sure they did the whole get married and have kids thing, they’ve done a bit of traveling, now they’re continuing in their ways of redundance, but they’ve made a home for themselves. They love the home they’ve made, they’re proud of what they’ve done in their lives, and they have so much love left to give. I won’t disagree that maybe all of that or any of that isn’t right for you (especially since I don’t know you ha ha) but I just wanted you to know that there are happy people here, and it’s a very nice place to live (maybe not for me either, I prefer cold.. and mountains).