and his fourth-grade curiosity caught on as the two of us carefully lifted the flaps. Inside, a pamphlet glowed with happy students reading in the sun, the school’ s motto“ The Catholic College for Independent Thinkers” scrolled beneath them. The neatly folded sweatshirt with the university’ s logo fit perfectly. The reputation of the Classics program, the promise of a semester in Italy, and the sweetly unfathomable swath of American land that would separate me from my life twinkled and glittered like the Lone Star itself. Even the shape of the state held promise, its dips and curves the antithesis to Rhode Island’ s sharp, rectangular edges. I needed to leave behind the last two years of high school, of tenuous friendships, anxiety induced stomach aches, and long talks about my dad’ s failings as a husband that my mother and I had in the garage while she tapped the long ashes of her cigarette into an empty soda can.
Yet this decision had consequences. My 12-year-old sister and 10-year-old brother would lose the sanctuary of my bedroom’ s pink beaded curtain with its couch where I supervised math problems, and the TV which muffled the sounds of our parents’ bitter accusations and endless arguments which laid bare their rankled unhappiness with one another. The two of them would have to take up the weight of my parents’ silence at the dinner table on their small shoulders. There would be one less pair of eyes to glance at for comfort.
Even with a scholarship, I knew my parents would need to contribute substantially to my tuition, though I would work all four years to supplement their funding. Having only recently moved out of a situation where my brother, sister, and I were sharing a bedroom, I felt the weight of the coin they would shell out for airfare, for tuition, for food. But, I had made the decision, and it would have to work out, for the cowboy boots I had already promised my siblings, a cheap trick to distract them from the nervousness stirring around my departure, and for the firstborn, trail-blazing success that I had promised my parents by mailing in the commitment letter. I had promised myself that somewhere out in the brush weed or in the blanket of stars big and bright that shined over grassy flatlands, I might find something for me.
For all the determination that fired my purpose, I was unprepared for the complex texture of my destination. The huge vistas of sky on sky that canopied the flat of the Texas panhandle disoriented me. The access roads running parallel to the highway made knowing where to get on and off almost impossible, yet any spin of a radio dial turned up country. The cell-changing heat made driving with air conditioning and closed windows ubiquitous, and the polite absence of screaming, swearing, and honking that so colored Boston’ s streets unsettled me.
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