Living in Your Head
and Living in The World
Friends,
Last week, I got into my car and drove down I-35, past a big white van with “Honk if you love Jesus” scrawled on the windows in white shoe polish, past flags flying at half-mast for Uvalde, past Cracker Barrel after Cracker Barrel, past the city of Troy where I felt like Odysseus in a Kia Soul, past prefab homes in pieces on the side of the highway. I was going to Austin to give a talk on travel writing.
I lost my taste for Austin when I lived there during the first year of the pandemic, when on the weekdays I saw no one, and on the weekends I would walk to the house of my then-boyfriend, who worked roughly 18 hours a day, his face awash in the glow of the computer monitors that encircled his keyboard. His mother, who lived with him, languished before his television, engrossed in Below Deck or Shark Tank. Sometimes his best friend who was plainly in love with him would sit in front of the TV, too. The best friend also attended family Thanksgiving and all the family birthdays, and fancied herself not just practically family but a blood relative. “In this family, we don’t like olives,” she would say.
