Five days until I leave El Paso.
My family is gone, the house is empty and I have no reason to return to it. I have no reason (unless I find one) to return to the west side of the city. I have no practical reason to do anything except stay my hotel room, eat and go to work. Nothing else.
I don’t have many friends, and fewer friends here. After three and half years, those I would call friends have moved away. Other friends are not really friends, not so much when they figure personal errands are more important than sharing final moments with you before you leave. I really don’t blame them. I’m no different. Friends I’ve had whose company I enjoyed at work I never made time for outside of work.
Nor they for me.
When you are younger your interaction with friends is more unplanned, more casual. Stopping by was acceptable, so was overstaying your welcome. With age you become more guarded, more inconvenienced by casual interaction with friends. Less time on the telephone. Emails become fewer and fewer. It takes dedication, maintenance to build and maintain strong relationships with your friends and acquaintances. Being part of a transient lifestyle, moving every so often, compounds the difficulty of forming bonds with others around you.
Now I’m beginning again.
After three and half years, the place you call home grows on you in profound ways. El Paso, a border city home to mostly Mexican-Americans and Mexicans, is a unique culture that outsiders do not easily adjust to. Time allows you to adapt, or if not adapt, accept. I accepted El Paso, Mexican Food, hot, arid weather, no rain, long drives, inconsiderate and dangerous drivers, Spanish spoken rather than English, Mexican license plates, the Juarez Mayor living in our neighborhood while his constituents live in fear, Spanish-speaking only classes in my daughter's public school, dust storms, roadside views of one of the poorest, most violent cities in the world during my morning and evening commutes, the worst music selection on the radio, and being one of only a few households that does their own yard work and housecleaning. I will not miss the fact every asshole in this city has a dog in their yard and has house parties until three in the morning and no one has the balls to tell them to be quiet or call the police.
West Texas (far West Texas) has been my home for three and half years. I wear boots and jeans year-round. I wear long-sleeve shirts year round. The heat no longer bothers me. I don’t know what I’ll do in two weeks when I’m outside of Kansas City near the Missouri River and the humidity is ten times as intense. I may not change anything. I’m 41, and I’m concerned less and less about my comfort. My comfort becomes important only when I am unable to do what I normally do, and If not, I change what needs to be changed.
I will miss El Paso, but I leave with no regrets about anything I’ve left behind. Every time I move away from somewhere, I first feel the need to take in as much as I can of the things I have enjoyed most about a place. Later when the time of departure nears, that desire lessens and though you don’t acknowledge it, you’ve already left where you are. The emotions are gone and you just want to get gone and on your way.
Things I despise about this town are the things that collectively lead me to admire it. My favorite, iconic scene in the city – driving I-10 eastbound near Schuster Avenue Exit 18. To the left of the highway – Unversity of Texas – El Paso, with its Sun Bowl and Pagoda, Aztec Temple-like university buildings; on the right – the disinegrating remains of the McKinney Wrecking Company, the Jesus Lives grain bins of an unnamed rescue mission, the border fence, the Rio Grande, then the crumbling hillsides of the Northwest Juarez outskirts, with their hovels of all different colors clinging to the precipice, not one the same as another, with steep, unfinished streets leading up and across the undulating terrain, with Mount Cristo Rey to the North, the Asarco smelter smokestack standing like a sentinel shoulder to shoulder with Mount Cristo Rey’s statue of Jesus Christ, creating an enigmatic scene of a struggling civilization so close to their dream of a better life, within arm’s reach of it, but truly a world away, a scene of layers of ascension – a dirty drug and murder-ridden purgatory, separated by a river and a fence with sentries posted to prevent any further journey along the path to self-determination, with a sea of automobiles of those chosen for that life looking down upon them in contempt, disregard. Cutting through all, the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe passes between Jesus Christ and the smokestacks, then between I-10 and the rescue mission.
Few places offer this experience of extremes…and at a safe distance.
Though I have many dislikes, this contrast of contrasts is moving. No artist could contrive a more chaotic, perfect scene.
What if a community was rid of these extremes? If everything was good? How would it be? I would not think much is left to the imagination. No bad to measure the good, no good to measure the bad.
If your city, if your life - were a painting, would anyone find it the least bit fascinating?
Continuing down I-10 the morning sun casts a shadow across the Franklin Mountains, the rail yards down town, the historic district with its bungalows, the refinery structures and oil tanks in central El Paso north of the river, the consistent sprawl of Cuidad Juarez endlessly to south, until Highway 54 comes into view and the Spanish-style buildings and steeple on West Fort Bliss sit atop a mesa to the northeast. These are the scenes from my daily life in El Paso that will remain with me as common memories of a place I grew to accept and appreciate.
My favorite stores – Starr Westernwear and the Tony Lama boot outlets – unique to El Paso. Authenticity of any kind is becoming more and more of a rarity in the world.
So now I’ll leave my office and return to my hotel room, eat dinner, read, watch television. In five days I’ll wake up and I’ll no longer be here. The people and places I see every day will be gone. Most of these people and places I’ll never see again, or see them the way I do now. Will life continue on here, I will not know, because I will not be here, and therefore I cannot assume it does as I remember it.
Our existence in our life and in the lives of others is only in our presence at a place and time and no other. Your life only exists where you are and with the people you are with and nowhere else and with no one else.
This part of my life is ending, gone.
