No Glory in the West
Longing and nostalgia are a distressing combination when where you want to go only exists in the past.
This feeling became unbearable after I started reading All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Set in the southwest of the US during the 1950s, his books are brutal, no one escapes his world without scars both mental and physical. The novels are full of the authors philosophy about life and the world at large. Reading them I can relate to the characters there emotional, stubborn, dedicated to life and utterly human. The landscape they live in is indifferent to there plight.
The characters despite all they go through are free, they doom or save themselves and the ones who survive have to learn to live with the ghosts from there pasts. The landscape is so familiar to me, at times it felt like I could feel the west Texas sun and smell the prairie grasses on the wind. I can relate to the characters, there fight is my fight, although our motivations may be different. They embody the tragedy of belonging to a time that's in the past for everyone else.
I was born and raised in Texas but since living on the other side of the country I miss the culture of the Southwest. The generally friendly attitudes, bright colors and bold flavors of southern and Hispanic cooking are nearly impossible to find in the Northeast the food her is flavorless by comparison and the people need time to warm up to strangers and if your not familiar with how they show affection they have a tendency to come off as cold and aggressive. The overall culture is drastically different the Irish and Italian American cultures hold sway here. I don't think I'll ever get used to or fit in here but I never wanted to try and fit in anyway. Tho that doesn't help the feelings of longing and isolation.
I miss the west in McCarthy's books, a time and place I've never known. Just the longing for a place that's familiar is enough to make me feel nostalgic about my childhood.
I'm sure you've already made you're assumptions about what it means to be a queer from the south, but I do love my home town. I didn't escape I left to learn and grow and experience a part of the US I'd never been to before.
My hope is that I might be able to return to the south some day, maybe not for forever but even just for a little while would help me to feel a little less alone.
I know that if I hadn't moved away I would have been a very different person, but not myself.
Who I am now will change and life will leave its scars on me.
Maybe some day I'll make it back to my wild west. Maybe we'll both have changed for the better.
Until Then,
-J
P.S.
Photos taken by me on a road trip from California to Texas.
