You either know or you don't. You stay and settle, or you run like hell; praying it all works out. No other feeling exists but the feral tiger waking inside a soul, confined. The creature is too ferocious, too passionately courageous. A soul not worth taming. What is the point?

​

The inner tiger that is me, got its throat slit as soon as the airport doors opened. That was the last time I returned. “Home” is a funny word. It stopped feeling like that five years ago.

​

The path was slow, tumultuous, but irrevocably chosen. I believe no one chooses this. If they did, we would all be submitted to one home. Born and meant to die in the same place.

​

Your parents’ lives show you what you do and don’t want. I was eleven when I understood their lesson. I took notes.

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The only thing holding them accountable was their greatest overseer: me. I witnessed my parents live. Paycheck to paycheck, hating their jobs, simply being content and safe. I learned to associate the city that raised me with a death wish. As a high school graduate during the pandemic, I saw no other option other than to stay, so I stayed.

•

            At 19, I threw myself against the bars of the cage with the final, frantic strength of the tiger I had left, fighting to live out my last teenage year.

​

It was naïve for me to declare this battle before entering my twenties. By unleashing this tiger that was crawling and scratching my soul since birth, it seemed. I didn't just escape—I unlocked a more dangerous tiger, one that now knew what life tasted like outside of this little corner of West Texas.

​

It was the first time ever; I really experienced the “home feeling” outside of my hometown. I couldn’t believe that was true! How could it—all I’ve seen was the isolated burning steel of border walls slapping me in the face everywhere I turned.

​

The tiger was out, and it was monstrous and golden. To say the least, the healing had begun. Ever since then, I call it an experiment. A research project. My insight? Sun showers is a sign that I better be ready for the life I’m currently in to be washed away. A detox, a cleanse, iscoming up from the strange horizons. In which I’m reminded: “These are the times you’ll remember well,” a Michigan Freddy Mercury fan said to me under the influence of rebellion and sweet experience.

•

            Going into my twenties, the question was simple: If I could leave, would I? At twenty-one, I said no, because of my parents. Now, at twenty-three, I say yes, because of them.

​

There is a string that runs from my body to theirs. They live vicariously through their children. That’s why I know, a child’s healing is the parent’s redemption.

​

As long as I unapologetically live, go on, and never look back; don’t give into the nostalgia, they shall too—in their own “I-don’t-give-a-damn" way.

​

Each time I return home from another fever dream of a trip, they see the tiger in me, uncaged, not broken in, yet—no one can, in fact.

​

Each experience is an experiment, just another research project— collecting data— does this variable fit; does it belong?

•

            The other side of this game is how can I heal when I keep getting ripped open?

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You have to have a stomach for this. These “tiger experiences” get tattooed inside your eye lids, so every time you close your eyes, you see the life you left just to come back “home.”

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Every time the El Paso air sucker punches you. The jaded stale energy that surrounds you and immune community you must walk through to get to the end of the day; it all feels like falling in your dreams.

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You never really crash, do you? You always wake up before you hit the ground.

 

I never stopped falling, you see?

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I need to keep running until I know the distance is true. Until I know I cannot return—been doing it since 19. So, I kept writing down my hypothesis about this extensive research I was about to bound on for the next upcoming years before hitting 25.

 

Just to see if, when my frontal lobe develops, all the collected data means anything. If it does, then the morning I wake up at 25, I will have my guts for breakfast. I will know where I fit.

•

            I’m even surprised I was allowed back into a world that has nothing left to offer me anymore recently.

​

This last time, coming “home” felt like waking up as a kid to an empty house. Your parents didn’t wake you up before leaving for work. You go inside your parent's room and smell their bed and pillows— coffee and cigarettes. That was home—the last time I remember it.

 

Home was headbanging with Dad in the kitchen on a Saturday morning while cleaning the house. Home was passionately singing along to Journey in the backseat of my mother’s silver car on a rainy Friday afternoon, after a day of playing hooky.

•

            Now, El Paso is just another place you can't escape from. It's the damn twilight zone. This is the real test, if this city is nothing more than a temptation, if I give into, will I be damned forever?

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Every street corner one turns on is a reminder of failed relationships, jaded friendships, regrets, mistakes, history just baggage up; ready and stocked—all for you to sort through, right there... in the middle of a Walmart aisle. It’s just you and a person from the past.

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Waking up every day feels like I'm in a doom of stimulation. Choosing the route of how my days are going to be lived out. Well, I’ve given in.

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Some days are easier just to dig up past attitudes and behaviors from my old selves—it worked for me in the past. Should I go out and unbury an old friend just to see their face again? All the versions of myself still live underneath my bed and in my childhood home walls.

 

That’s the greatest reliable narrator and witness of all!

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So riddle me this, how am I expected to move on and out when I'm still sleeping in the web and shadows of every single version that has come before me today?

 

Every commute down the same constructed highway roads that will lead me to nowhere, are just smashing into one day to the next. I don't get a chance to thaw out, because every snag that I get caught on, gets deeper every day.

•

            The calling is like a tap on the shoulder, and you immediately know who it is.

 

That’s when I know the tiger in me needs to move! Leave! Get the hell out of dodge, when it’s dying for experience: a slice of life. Cut the tiger several while you’re at it. Or else, she will rip your head off.

 

Or if you’re lucky, she will get detracted and snap out of it, by the honking bumper to bumper traffic on the freeway to her 10:30am class.

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If the city can get what it wants, I’ll have to unpack the baggage right and then there in traffic; all the things that I thought I sorted it out and solved and therapy on a random Monday morning.

 

El Paso makes you want to subject and settle for anything less than an upgrade. The city has a funny way of saying to its constituents: whatever has worked in the past, that same curriculum still is enforced today.

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I only realized these little annoying, badgering punches as no friend of mine—anymore. In fact, the city needed me more than I needed it. I can't wait to amputate the city from my body.

 

There's only so many times where you can act dumbfounded when you keep getting yourself into the same predicament over & over again, because that's the only thing assessable and reachable to you.

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Yes, this lesson, yet again.... why? Because what more is left? What more do you have to offer?

 

Same face, same charm. It’s intoxicating—the idea that this time could be different. Truth: it’s a rancid horror movie. I'm 23, the Killer, and Nostalgia is the Final Girl. She always survives. 

Just      kill       her      off      already.

​

You know where all the bodies are buried, it’s muscle memory. Funny, you actively look for something else to blame like Time, Change, or Distance.

 

Eventually, it starts looking like insanity. Repeating old patterns and expecting a different result and outcome every time. Like you’re pushing a square peg into a circle. Then wondering and looking around you with your hands up in the air, red-handed, in the merry go-round of piecing together shattered pieces of what once was.

•

           If I was truly meant to stay here in my hometown, then I would’ve received an immense tailored reasons just for me to stay, but I didn’t.

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Give one to me, I dare you! I wouldn't be having my reoccurring daydream be a nightmare in the contorting hours of the night keeping me awake. Just imagine, what if, I just kept on driving?

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Past the construction traffic and road rage. What if I just let go and let be? Just keep on driving until I magnetically get pulled into a place that is thirsty for me and my passion and aura.

 

This is all one hell of a test though. One hell of an experiment too. To constantly be hustling and researching what fits. When I keep on amputating different parts of my body and psyche to see if the phantom pain still aches at night like it does here in El Paso.

 

I also play iSpy game with the universe and myself. I spy... with my little eye... another reason to not stay here. But after returning home recently, I unveiled another segment of the game. Now look at the calls. Call them back. Listen to the relentless voicemails left to your name.

 

You know where the calls come from. Oh, future? She's ready to give you a tour of what you're in for.

 

Then it’s The Call, you'll realize, is coming from the inside of the home.

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No, not the home that leaves you high and dry. Like the blind leading the blind, what a sick game. The temporary mini homes that get their share of the rent every once or twice a year. When Fortunate's fate calls, you answer, don't you?

•

            It’s always all happening, everywhere, in every corner, romantic magic dancing in the corners of experience. That’s where home ruminates from—that’s homebase.

 

This last home base though... something sparked and short circuited in the ether. This experiment became ALIVE. I didn’t know this, but I was dead for quite some time before leaving.

 

And now, I’ve risen from the dead, as if someone summoned me and prayed over my ashes. A fire was lit. Gave me something to hold onto, and to believe in. If my cup was heavy enough to tether me down to something—solid ground, a place I call home, from el mirador.

 

I was told to LOOK! Watch as I fly. It was always possible, it’s all happening.

 

It was like an ambiguous butterfly interaction, lasting less than a minute. But it was long enough for my tiger to rage on. Roar and eat this slice of life up, down to the bone.

 

I was pleading to the universe, the ones that have sent me this experience, to just hold on. I prayed, boarding my flight, If it’s not too late, give me a reason for me to stay.

 

Don’t go away—not yet! I want to go back. At this point it started to sound like a nurturing soothing goodnight prayer you would quickly recite when the closet was looking a bit strange in the dew of dawn.

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Nostalgia—no survivor; no friend of mine. It’s an infectious demon. It’s coming up from behind me; it makes me grind my jaw and hang my eyes low. It’s breathing down my neck as I find a seat on the plane back home.

 

I shudder in a breath, trying to contain the tears in my eye duct. Because I swear to God, I heard the moon last night tell me to stay! But this afternoon sun is telling me different, it’s spoke a different truth that ring loudly and coldly true this morning, when I started counting down the minutes to my flight as I texted my mother my airline information.

•

            Home— look around you; who’s here? No one. But your parents. They want you to do better than them. Your mother voice rages on in the cartilage of everything you do, reminding you like everything else in this damn city: DON’T JUST BE CONTENT. Never settle. You’ll never forgive yourself!

 

This didn’t knock my frontal focus the day I had to return now, did it?

 

That’s why guilt and shame took the driver’s seat the day you returned home. Because in under a week, you saw the birth and death of a life that could’ve been. And you are mourning the life that you wanted to stay incendiary in the corner of your present life. Something to live through every day.

 

Your father and mother instructed and protested some weeks before you left for Austin: IT’S NOT SELFISH FOR LIVING. Go. Live.

 

So why is this particular battle happening every time I return home? Feeling like I just stepped into quicksand—I am stagnant, stuck. I’m reaching, I’m holding on to…. what?

 

Look around you, no one is home. Just go back. Whatever the hell you came from.

 

Look, my father sighed when he picked me up from the airport, after seeing my face twisted and contorted in complexity. He’s not a man of many words, but the ones that do escape from his heart, stick onto me like this city. Just the words I needed to hear, after my throat was slit open.

 

Mira, todo pasa.

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