by Eric Howerton
…or a banana, and when you peel it and take a bite you most certainly should not be sent to Dallas circa 1879, where you have no other choice but to work as a shoe shine “boy” (You’re 37 and a former cattle rancher with a cattle rancher’s hide, but everyone here is a sun-screen virgin and so frog-throated from tobacco they think you’re in your early 20s.) until eventually becoming a leather tanner and then a shoe designer, and a celebrated one at that, the owner of multiple workshops that process daily orders from out of state and even abroad. None of this should have happened.
Sometimes, when you look at the wind-up watch you came here with, the watch your friends in—now—1891 admire so much and keep trying to buy off you (you waver every time they offer more and more), you are reminded of the family of tomorrow you left behind: the hay-haired boy who hated steak unless it was well past well; the green-eyed girl who would rather watch a window than a TV—and you wonder If I’m here, are they alive right now, or are they yet to be alive? And If I am here, will they be alive? And Am I a bad person if I’ve made the best of this situation and love the family I have now more than I loved them because they are here? When you have these thoughts you are consumed with a darkness beyond guilt, emotions unnamed and unknown to anyone but yourself, and though you did not choose to travel back here (you only chose to unpeel what you thought was a tropical banana at your inventor brother-in-law’s annual, accident-prone cocktail party) the weight of it all crushes you so profoundly that when you take your current wife and children to experience a choral arrangement in the town square, where the crowd is so moved people openly weep upon finding their stories in the lyrics and their pain in the throats of others, you hear and feel only the reverberating echo of your own, beating heart. From deep within this chamber of self, you wonder if anyone has ever written or will ever write a song that you will relate to, now or then; a song spanning unfathomable time and ringing of creation undone, of love lost, of irreversible disappearance; a song about the pain of having lost a life you cannot go back to and would not return to if you could; a life you already lived that hasn’t happened yet.
Eric Howerton is an OSU professor of English, the director of the Center for Poets and Writers at OSU-Tulsa, and the vocalist for the loud musical act Lake Mar/e. He is passionate about film/filmmaking, skiing, food studies, agriculture, and cooking.
Emerge Literary Journal 