Aqui.

South Texas is the only place I've lived that gives me a sense of the roundness of the Earth. The sky is not an endless expanse; if I look far enough past the dryness, I can detect a curvature in the land. Above it, the crystalline blue ceases to be a canopy, but rather becomes a blinding white wall I might, at any moment, roll in to.

And there's little here in this misnomer of a Valley to keep me from doing so. It lacks the opposites-attract pull of my family. It lacks the heaviness of buildings erected on the winning side of history. It lacks the cradle of live oaks clearly demarcating the roads and paths. Here, I depend on my own sense of balance and stability to keep from tumbling into the place where blueness fades into nothing.