after a letter about a friend

            houston is warm and smooth and deep and dark and red. It is the feeling of holding a mug in two hands, of wrapping my hands around a lover’s lower rib cage and knowing this is home.

            houston is brown brackish water washing up against concrete and water stains on bayou walls. It is the feeling of cold waves thieving sand out from under my feet and an understatement of I think I’m homesick. It is knowing that no air will ever smell as good as the air in the pickup line outside the airport, rain-tinged and earthy, and it is feeling my father’s stubble catch on my hair as I hug him for the first time in, maybe ever.

            houston is gnashing teeth and liberty-spiked hair colliding against the foot of a DIY stage in some old backyard or porch or warehouse, wet heat shaking with sound. It is sweat and skin crushing me into all the space I’ve ever needed and it is flight through turbulence, rolling and roiling and red-eyed, my fists held up to protect my face. 

            houston is serene in a way that suggests this is the slowest it’ll get and it is knowing that new york city is way too fast and it is the outline of my roommate sleeping across the room as I sit up in my bed and try to cry quietly because here is not home even though it has all the makings of one. 

            houston is the ceramic teapot that I fill with tea leaves and ginger when I feel sick and it is the small hand-shaped cups my parents brought back from some trip abroad. It is sitting around the dining table with my sisters when they came back from college and sipping rooibos deep into the night. It is catching up with people I’ve never had to. 

            houston is wearing tank tops until November and flashing my hazard lights in monsoon rains, long rides on bayou bike paths that get dark before the rest of the city and dog-walks on suburban trails in late fall, when the evenings are finally cool enough to go out. It is early morning skate park trips with friends, sitting and skating and smiling until the sun forces us into our cars.  

            houston is the white tablecloths of dim sum restaurants that my mother takes us to on saturday mornings, the tea spilled and collected around the base of the teapot and it is walking with my grandmother to the car afterward knowing that I should be savoring this moment because I do not have many moments left with her and the last time she hugged me she said thank you 嵘嵘 (my chinese name) and I wiped away tears after closing the car door. 

            houston is summer nights that stick to my skin, sitting on a park bench in some odd corner of the city, looking across an empty field toward a skyline I have known all my life. And I am staring out at those flat-topped skyscrapers inside their thin highway halo and my eyes are following those buildings up, up, up to a few small stars scattered above my city. my city, houston texas.