By Coco-Lily Garrett-Kellett
The dirt in Texas is a jealous lover—obsessive, ever-clinging, a kind of feral intimacy that finds your softest spots and lays its claim. It’s not just on you, it becomes you. Laced in the sweat behind your knees, wedged into your molars, whispering perversions in your sleep. I swear, if you die here, the land won’t let go. It’ll wrap around your ribcage like ivy, humming lullabies in a language only ghosts know.
People always want to talk about the heat like it’s some charming Southern quirk—sweet tea weather, shirtless boys mowing lawns, clichés cut from a Walmart calendar. But the sun here isn’t romantic. It’s a fascist. A blinding tyrant that erases shadows and bleaches thought. Every summer’s just another battle in a long, losing war against spontaneous combustion. You don’t live in Texas. You ferment.
And still, people fantasise. They want to mythologise the dust. Turn us into cowboys with existential Instagram captions. But if you’ve never pissed blood from dehydration on a Tuesday, do not speak to me of wide-open spaces. The only thing wider out here is the silence between someone’s first dream and its execution. Which is to say: dreams die here in technicolour. Often under strip mall signage or the cracked smile of a drywalled Jesus.
I live on a farm, technically. But calling it that is like calling a hospice patient a “long-term vacationer.” My dad planted things once. Squash, corn, disappointment. Nothing grew right. The soil here has an attitude problem. It rejects effort with a slow snarl. We grow rust, mostly. And secrets. Both crawl up the walls like mold. And every year, there’s some slick asshole from the city who drives by and says, “Oh, this would make a cute Airbnb.” I want to shoot out their tires.
It’s not nostalgia that keeps us. Nostalgia implies some version of “good” ever existed here. No, it’s inertia. It’s trauma as tradition. The same reason we keep a broken fridge on the porch or never fix the fence the coyote chewed through last year. This land doesn’t belong to us. It just tolerates us the way a tumour tolerates skin.
My boots are a sermon in decay—worn, cracked, cruel. They carry me past the chickens, who no longer cluck, as if they’ve all collectively decided to go mute out of protest. Or enlightenment. Honestly, I wouldn’t blame them. I’ve started to think they know something. Like maybe they remember a time before humans invented God, grocery stores,vape pens and blessed the land with strip clubs and Dollar Generals. Maybe they’re waiting for us to finally go extinct.
My mother’s perfume smells like denial. Chanel for women who read horoscopes and cry in parking lots. Her face is a palimpsest—makeup over memory, blush over boredom. She practices smiling like it’s going to matter. Every morning, she gazes into a mirror older than I am, one warped by sun and futility. She looks like she’s waiting for a portal to open. Or maybe for someone to shoot her a look that says, “Hey. It wasn’t all for nothing.” But the mirror just reflects static and pores.
Dad’s less man than landscape now. He talks to corn…ormaybe at it. The distinction is meaningless. Every so often, I catch him staring at the horizon like there’s a parade coming. Like any minute now, salvation might arrive in a lifted truck with a cooler full of beer and some purpose we forgot. But all that ever shows up is more sky.
And Rocco. God. Rocco is the sort of guy who thinks wearing cologne makes him mysterious. He’s not blood, though I lie and say he is. It’s easier than explaining he’s the byproduct of the local drug economy and a failed DIY tattoo phase. He deals from the back of trucks and quotes Joe Rogan unironically. He’s charisma with cavities. And somehow, he’s the most successful person we know. Which should tell you everything.
This place is full of people like him. People who learned too young that power isn’t real unless someone suffers for it. We grow sociopaths the way California grows almonds— relentlessly, with too much water. And still, the horizon pretends to hold promises. The sky sells blue lies. And we stay.
Because where would we go?
The world outside this dirt doesn’t want us either. We’re the kind of people you stroll past. Too much, too grimy, too real. America likes its poverty aestheticised, its trauma curated. But we don’t know how to filter. We’re stuck in sepia. Our tragedies don’t trend.
And yet, somehow, I still write this. As if words could loosen the grip. As if poetry could build an escape hatch. Maybe it can. Maybe one day someone will read this and understand the symphony of silence that plays when your whole life is held together by duct tape and debt.
Maybe that someone is you.
And maybe you’ll come here one day, thinking it’s romantic. You’ll take a picture of the cracked dirt. Add a filter. Caption it something like, “wild hearts can’t be tamed.”
And I’ll be watching. Laughing.
From the porch.
With a joint.
In boots full of ghosts.
