Last Chance Texico
I’m a work in progress, and so is this website. My dreams outpace my body sometimes. Please know that I will be working to share more about my story and what has helped me along the way in hopes that it helps others.
For now, know that the shiny pictures on my home page only say so much. What you can’t see is the heartache and healing and half finished projects and money that should have gone elsewhere. I needed an old pretty light to fill a hole in me more than I needed to pay down student loan debt. Yes, I said need. You can’t see the extra work I created for myself and my husband when he already works his fingers to the bone. You can’t see my piles of notes and notebooks, empty coffee cups, and sometimes incoherent scribblings that come out of my ADD brain. You can’t see how I favor a creative outpouring over dishes that pile up and laundry that grows…along with my guilt of not being able to do more. You can’t see how I struggle with organization or how I thought these pictures would add up to what I thought was my Hail Mary, part two of my life that would be written by me instead of the old messages I had accumulated. Yes, I thought they were my Last Chance Texaco as Rickie Lee Jones would sing, which I sit here listening to, crying to, writing to.
Some images are raw and tell a story words never can. They speak truth. Other images can trick you, lie to you, and tell you that someone really has it all together. I think about people who do, whose car is neat and tidy, whose life fits into neat compartments, whose manicured nails match their perfectly put together selves. That’s not me. Surviving wouldn’t allow for that kind of put-togetherness. Slow blooming during motherhood wouldn’t either. The photo of the woman tangled up in old film…that's me, just trying to figure it all out. If you have it figured out, please tell me. But for now, I’m going to lean into this, because I see beauty in these messy bits, too now.
My eyes need beauty the way my lungs need air. My disorganization doesn’t help with this need, and you can understand why I might often feel I’m choking in a city that builds without care and where the color green is in scarce supply. Creating in my home through my surroundings became my outlet when I had so many mornings saying, “I just have to make it to the end.” So many days crying when no one was looking. I’d slap a functionally depressed smile on my face and wonder why I always felt I was on the outside looking in.
Would you believe my world has been so small that barely any eyes see what I create? That’s why I know it was just my need…some insatiable need that even I couldn’t quite understand. I learned to smooth drywall mud on walls to get rid of texture that looked too new and cookie cutter. Details are my poetry. I wanted my new home to look old. Before finishing one project, I was curbed by fatigue or too much to do or an image in my head of the next space that I had to get out of my head and into reality. Sounds a little manic, I know. All that up and down has lived inside of me like a storm. I’ve always been trying to understand myself…to understand what broke.
I understood a little more when I read the book, Sacred Spaces, by Carly Summers. The stories in her book were about people who healed through their spaces, too. This is my refuge, my little island of healing that also seems to torture me, because I’m limited by time and money and to-do’s. It’s an unfinished puzzle, a book I’ll never finish, perhaps. Loose ends never feel good. But a little cat whispered in my ear a story about love, and so I’ve been lingering along a different path. But it’s been a lovely path. I remembered the little girl inside me, and together, we’ve been healing and remembering who we were supposed to be. It would have been so much easier had I chosen a canvas to paint.
BoBo, will you be my Last Chance Texaco? I love you so. Thank you for helping me remember.
