“There is no peanut butter at the peanut butter warehouse.” – travel journal entry, Galveston, TX – Day 9

Inundation

Things I am afraid of, in no particular order:
1. Heights
2. Peanuts
3. Death by drowning
4. Pain

1. It’s only mom and me now. Julian paid for the house, but he doesn’t live there. He sleeps at the office a lot. Julian runs a website where people trade their used stuff. When I say “runs a website,” I mean Julian hands out paychecks to 200 people at the end of the month. It’s a big company and a big house. We have a view – some of the hills, all of Austin. When I drive home at night I try not to look out the window because the valley is bottomless. I focus on the rearview mirror – just a tiny snapshot of lights and darkness, a fragment of what’s below.

2. There’s no peanut butter in the peanut butter warehouse. I know this because I looked for it. Instead, there’s antique furniture and vintage jewelry. My mother was buying a lamp when it happened. My father slumped down to the ground. His heart gave out. They tried to resuscitate him but it was no use, and the lamp is in the living room now. It’s made out of polished seashells and it makes too much sound when the window’s open. Sometimes at night I will go to the bathroom and I will wet a towel and put the damp towel over the lamp. It keeps the noise down. My mother says I am ruining the floors, but I know, given the choice, she prefers something damaged to something shiny.

3. My great-grandmother witnessed the 1900 Galveston hurricane. She survived it. I say my great-grandmother and not my great-grandparents because we’re not sure about my great-grandfather. He may have made it. My great-grandmother said even years later sometimes she would see him somewhere, never knowing if he was in the street or just in her head. She said he always looked like he’d just had a major scare. I guess a large wave would give you that scare. My great-grandparents were married for thirty-eight years and there are five stages of drowning: surprise, involuntary breath holding, unconsciousness, hypoxic convulsions, clinical death. Julian says stages 1-4 sound like a regular Saturday night at the office.

4. When I was three years old I knocked out my front teeth. I tripped and fell. That’s what I told my mother. The truth is that Julian pushed me. He was eight. They were my baby teeth. My new teeth didn’t grow for several months. Julian said it was an exercise in patience – that I would have to learn how to sit and wait. So I practiced the sitting, and I practiced the waiting. I sat and waited for such a long time that when the first tooth pushed through my gums, I didn’t understand what was happening. My jaw was aching. It was a good thing, Julian said. He said, sometimes, oftentimes, it’s better to wait not expecting anything at all. It is then that pain can sometimes become something else.