Theme Week Eleven

                The thing about this town is that nothing ever changes. Not for the better, anyways. When new restaurants open downtown, boasting authentic Mexican food or unique sandwiches, it can be almost certain they’ll eventually close their doors and re-open as something new a few months later to a slow trickle of customers who try it out once and decide they like their usual place more. People who like what they already know. Here, chain restaurants like Longhorn Steakhouse or Bugaboo Creek rate as fine dining.

                But even as storefronts change signs, the people walking the streets remain the same. Stuck in their routine, they hurry to grab a coffee in the morning where the lady behind the counter knows their order by heart. She works every weekday morning until about noon, has for years and many of her customers have grown to consider her a friend. Not to mention she’s the only one who knows how to make their coffee right.

                There are more people now than there used to be. More people walking around, broke and looking for a break that will never come. Too poor to own a car, too many years of bad luck and bad decisions to make a change now.

                I felt safe here when I was a kid. I walked the streets after dark, playing outside until the only light in the sky was the glimmer of the moon and the stars. Strangers didn’t scare me and I never remembered to lock the door. It’s different now and while walking at night, every person I pass seems like a threat as they mumble to themselves, their eyes darting every which way, paranoid. I stare at the ground and walk fast, cell phone in my hand. Last summer when I was bringing my trash cans to the side of the road, my neighbor come speeding towards me on his bike. Down the road his girlfriend called after him, screaming, “That’s my pillow! That’s MY pillow!!” She was enraged. He was leaving her, he explained. She was on Bath Salts and he “wouldn’t put up with that shit.” He loved her, he thought he was going to marry her, but not on those drugs. He said all of this as he scratched his arms and paced back and forth in my driveway. Every night I lock the door.

                Nothing ever changes around here, except the level of desperation in the faces of my neighbors, people who have given up on supporting themselves. They got lost along the way to drugs, alcohol. They were always here but there are more of them now. So nothing really ever changes, not for the better.