The Blue of Distance

I’ve always waited to see you. So now was not so different. Those long drives from Austin to Waco, to Fort Worth and back again. So many weekend trips. I lie in the back of the car staring out into the off-blue sky. Through tinted windows the colors never seemed right.

Texas is known for its endless horizon. I would stare at the clouds for hours while my mother played Spanish music and munched on pretzel sticks. I’d take up the entire back seat with my head hanging over the side while the sounds of Gypsy Kings meshed with the constant thump, thump, thump of the road beneath our car.

I remember that hum. Tires hitting uneven asphalt made the world a constant heartbeat beneath my head. We were a living body in that car. Your family. And you always made us wait.

So when she told me to come, come now – I knew it was time. I was on a job at the time, out in California. I thought about renting a car and driving all night to get to you, with the heartbeat in my head already starting.

But I waited. And that night I wondered why you were always so far away.

I put your day in the calendar recently. But I had trouble figuring out what to call it. ‘Death day’ sounds too morbid. ‘Funeral day’ sounds so sad. The ‘day you left for good’ is just too long for a calendar alert. So I simply put ‘dad day’. It feels odd to check the box for ‘recurring’. I’m not sure what I’m celebrating. Or what I’m trying to remember. You, gone, always. Down that long country road the south likes to reminisce over. It was such a blur, trying to get to you. I traveled from California that day and I found out in the airport. I remember staring out the window into that magnificently blue sky tinted slightly yellow from the sunglasses I had to keep on through the flight. I cried the entire 6 hours back, but the man next to me would never know it. I didn’t want to share this feeling with anyone.

I speak of distance. That physical distance between you and me was blue atmosphere. It was long car rides, and new beginnings. It was weekend trips and three hours long every time. It was music, and public radio and oranges. It was made-up songs and recitations of the Lion King over and over and over again. My whole family knew that movie word for word thanks to me. Well, except for you. Because the blue of distance means tinted blue sky and endless horizons to see you, to know you.

One time I choked on a strawberry candy. In your kitchen, with you feet away behind closed doors. But no one knows that story. I swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until I forced the candy down my windpipe. I almost died. No one knows that story.

Talking about you is talking about memory. Those clouds were endless. Those skies were blue. The tangible distance was 3 hours, or 189.9 miles on I-35.

I’m stuck on this distance. As a child it was a tangible way to know you. Now, it feels like I’m riding in that car endlessly to try and know you. Texas roads are long and seemingly go nowhere.

This body of work is primarily focused on the personification of the Texas landscape as explored through my father and our relationship. In August 2011, my father passed away. Though he was fighting pancreatic cancer, his death seemed sudden as he died mere hours before I could get back home to him. I’ve struggled with those last moments ever since. My father was a massive presence yet fleeting. He flitted in and out of my life in various ways and as such, I never knew him beyond the singular moments of fatherly life. Now, with time and distance, I understand him as I would the Texas landscape – familiar, a home. Yet unexplored and vast.

My father used to tell me that Texas was God’s Country. It was handpicked by a higher power and nothing would ever compare. So I went back home to explore this notion – to try and find my father within this land. What I realized, for all my father’s words, God was waiting for me in the hills, in the trees, in my mother’s hands. Through these images, I’m blurring the lines between Texas and my father. One becomes the other, becomes the other, becomes the other, continuously. Thus, begins the understanding of fluidity between life and death, and the father who is becoming the land. I recently compiled these images and writing into a book to be carried as a journal, a diary, a letter.