Dead Trees

In downtown San Antonio, along the only highway I regularly drive, the slums are evident: cracked and white, reminiscent of plaster--or Chicago before the fire. It isn't a presumptuous city. At the intersection of 281 and I-35, a two-story building, once a house, looks abandoned but supports a lit marque declaring "Girls =>". It points to nowhere else, a little block of warehouses; the building advertises itself. Passing by, especially at night as bulbs blink with invitation, I can imagine it is nothing except a brothel. Tattered and full of rooms, the old house admittedly uses women as a business, and though prostitution is illegal, I know something dark occurs there: greasy poles, aging bodies in lingerie, young girls fresh across the border.

I know in my writing, a voice has emerged. It isn't just darkness, like most people observe, rather tragedy, as though even describing a cat requires some amount of heart break. I have a joyful life, but I find some enchantment in the sadness of the world. A meadow full of decaying trees has more beauty than any brave cottonwood, fighting to live along a bank that often floods. I am drawn to things ending: a toll booth operator's career, a hay barn collapsed to its roof in the crops it used to hold. I won't ever turn off the highway, find through some San Antonio maze of roads that dead business, but I want to. Driving past, I want to capture it all, to see for myself the atrophy, to document the customers trapped there.