The More Things Change, the Less Abu Halen Wants to Wear a Tutu

I live in El Salvador. Again. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve lived in El Salvador, I’d have two dollars. That sentence was pretty anticlimactic.

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Dance the night away. (Gresham, Oregon; 1996)

Some things have changed since last time I was here. For instance, they turned the Hooters up at the traffic circle into a Wendy’s. That’s a plus. I’ve never been to Hooters but I bet their waitresses aren’t as cute or wholesome as Wendy. I feel like Wendy is pretty cute and wholesome, what with those freckles and pigtails. Dave Thomas, on the other hand, I didn’t trust that guy. You can’t trust people who smell like cloves. Now he smells like formaldehyde, so I’m good.

But some things are the same. The cafeteria ladies at the embassy still work there. They remembered me, which probably suggests that I need to spend less of my life in cafeterias slamming potato chips and Coke. One of the embassy motorpool drivers was driving me home one day and asked how my kids are doing. He used to be the embassy bus driver, and he recalled driving my children to and from school every day. I’m not sure I want people to remember my kids quite that well, but at the same time I’m touched. That was possibly a poor choice of words.

It feels like I’m back home now, in a foreign place. That makes me something akin to a walking juxtaposition, or perhaps a bobbing juxtaposition. With every passing year I feel more and more like I’m bobbing around somewhere, like I should be looking for something to tie off to. But I’m not, maybe because I no longer want to. Maybe because I had something and lost it.

I used to dream of the town where I was born. Ms Goodwin’s red and white house on the corner. You took a road up and out of town, the houses thinned out, the trees and hills thickened, and if you didn’t turn into our little neighborhood at Ms Goodwin’s house, the road just kept going, maybe to infinity. I never knew because we always turned at Ms Goodwin’s house.

As I got older and left home, that's when I would have dreams of moving up that road, approaching that red and white house. I always slowed down, craned my neck to glimpse my little neighborhood, my mother, young and straight in the window of our perfect brown home. I always yearned to turn at Ms Goodwin’s house into that safe, familiar, golden place. But in the dream I never did. I would swallow the knot in my throat, take a deep breath, and follow the highway upwards, further, toward all the things I don’t know.

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Post-nummies snuggles. (Antiguo Cuscatlan, El Salvador; September 2015)

I stopped having the dream one day. I don’t know when and I don’t know why. It probably has to do with electric pulses, neurons, gray matter. But maybe I’m so far up that road now, that old golden neighborhood so far behind me, that the tether is gone. Maybe my hippocampus is trying to tell me I’m not tied off to anything anymore, I’m just bobbing on the sky, wandering in the years, drifted so far that this foreign place is home and even home feels foreign.

Sometimes I think of my mother in the dream, all dark hair and tight skin in a square window. Watching me approach slowly from town, watching me pass her by and disappear up that winding road. What would you change if you could?