Company for Dinner

We took Kendra to Austin on Friday, for good. Austin is so cool it never fails to make me choke a little. She had a gift card to Whole Foods, so we went to the original on Lamar St. I remembered it from our state UIL trips, when it used to be across from the Waterloo music shop, but I'd never been inside. It was hopping. $36/lb. smoked chardonnay salt, Venus fly traps, marzipan in the shape of pregnant women, blueberry-sage breakfast sausages. It was all so absurd, and irresistible (just think of the dumpster!). And - oh! - the lovely people. I stared covetously at a slab of Indonesian ginger encrusted Norwegian salmon when a voice, velvety and deep, said, "Excuse me." I turned and stared covetously at this exceptionally fine human from his curly black hair to his sweet sunburnt feet, and shuffled out of the way as he eased his cart past. Then another caught my eye, fingering organic peaches, and a third beside the hummus cooler, glowing with what must be ahimsa, and my stomach contracted smaller and smaller, closing on its little love of strangers like an empty fist. God, what strangers. Devastatingly beautiful, shiny teeth and shinier intentions. Somehow Austin is just bursting with them, as though it's some designated youth&beauty zone. Pure-souled creatures, unblotted, besotted with hope, and I would jeer but somehow, miraculously, their futures are told secure in their middle-aged counterparts, the fit couples with a smile for all and sundry, doing what they love and loving what they do, shopping for organic pap with a planned, post-30 baby in a sling from their prenatal to India. I wanted to squeeze into the middle, be their beloved treat-stuffed pooch. I wanted to kiss those charming girls in their shabby summer dresses, with their hair cropped, field thistles in July heat, haven for thorn-bugs and hung with cocoons.
Everyone striving, believing, and it works...
I was a cicada creeping in its mud shell, Gregor Samsa loosed in the vegan pastries, something bent, mean, and cynical to the marrow, fiendish large capacity for happiness, but so blank, so furious and wondering and blasted, hideous like something deformed, and starving claws like crab's for power, power of determination, certainty, gladness, choice, justice, fortune.
Austin has always made me... wistful. I didn't go to school there, like I could have, because I was off chasing truth, love, and God in the frigid mountains. Now I couldn't polish myself to that special Austin gleam any more than I could become Japanese by wearing a kimono.
We left my sister there in that apartment building, buried like a seed. She'll grow into that town. She barely shed a tear. "No one stares at me here," she joked. Yeah, beauty loves company, don't it?