Blue Straggler

By Kathy Lynn Harris, Copyright ©2004

  On my kitchen windowsill sits a framed photograph of my brother and me astride a large, black mechanical bull at Gilley's in Pasadena. We're holding empty beer bottles we picked up outside in the parking lot like souvenirs, and the amber glass is catching a late afternoon sun from one of the club's only windows and throwing it across our faces. I'm twelve, he's just turned eight. Our lips are stained deep blue from sno-cones we bought from an old man set up roadside on Interstate 10. My brother is smiling for my mother's new 35 mm camera she bought at K-Mart. I have my hand on my hip, impatient.

  This was our family's summer vacation that year—a landmark three-hour trip to Houston's most famous bar with a side jaunt to Galveston for fresh oysters and Gulf shrimp.

  I can say without a doubt that was the last time I've been on a mechanical bull. It was not, however, the last time I felt the need to be somewhere other than where I was.

  My mother tells me not to exaggerate.

  She's the one who framed that photograph last year and wrapped it in bright pink paper in another feigned attempt to make me believe my brother had remembered my birthday. I always admire her efforts, however transparent.

  My good friend Idamarie disagrees with my mother. On many things. But mostly she understands I'm not embellishing my warbled state of mind.

  She says I should stop fighting the restlessness. Just sink down into it, hold it in my hands and squeeze it between my fingers like raw bread dough or thick river mud from the Guadalupe. She says that's when the heaviness resting on my chest and shoulders will lift some.