As I approach 40, I often find myself looking back to my past. I am pretty sure I do not want to live in those times, but I long for the headspace of certain moments in my life. In these memories I see myself - angry, carefree, full of vim and vinegar. But my worst qualities are smoothed out, and I can see myself as a happy young man.

There are a few places I revisit often. Seeing fire flies above the pasture of my first childhood home. My times in graduate school when my stipend as a TA went to funding my leisure time the entire two and a half years. The look on my dad's face when I served him ice cream at my first job, not knowing that he would pass away early the next day.

Lately, I have been revisiting the time just after my high school graduation. My parents packed up our house in Bryan and moved us out to an unincorporated parcel of land in Burleson county. It was, in many ways, like my first home. Driving down a gravel road passed Snook, Texas, you turned right at the T to go to Somerville State Park. You drove several more minutes down a gravel road nestled in the gorgeous post oak and pasture filled back country.

Then, you would turn down a smaller gravel road off the country road. Back here there are a number of small acreages. On 2.7 acres of pasture sat my parent's double wide trailer. Once a place I despised for taking me from the proximity and infrastructure of Bryan, TX, I found myself in awe of the place when I went out to visit it in October of last year.

But I specifically want to revisit a time, not a place. We are at the right place now, so let's spirit away to the autumn of 2006.

Sabotaging College

Well, we're actually going to start slightly before then - my senior semester of high school in the spring of 2006.

When applying for college, my first choice was Sul Ross State University. It is a fairly small state school located in the community of Alpine, Texas. It's a true mountain town, straddling the routes to both Big Bend and Davis Mountains. As I stated in my Big Bend trilogy, I lament not going here.

When I told my parents my intentions, my mother cried, and my father practically begged me to stay. He made it clear - he would support me no matter what, but he would really prefer I be closer.

Under their pressure, I applied to Texas A&M in the community of Bryan-College Station - my wife and I's hometown. Texas A&M had just axed the journalism program, which was my dream major. So, I applied for English and Political Science. I was an avid consumer of the news and watched the Daily Show and Colbert Report nightly. I knew my real passion lay in writing, however. My favorite movie back then, and still in my top five today, was All The President's Men. I wanted to fight for justice with the quill.

And I knew I never wanted to be an Aggie. I was that kind of Bryan townie.

I took measures to damage my ability to get accepted. I was not in the top 10% of my class, meaning that Texas's automatic admission was not in my favor. In a high demand school like A&M, this is a huge strike against me. This was unintentional - a mixture of me not understanding how to game the GPA system, plus lackluster returns in AP Statistics my senior year. But I still had a strong GPA, memberships, and other merits I could flex to better my chances.

I included these in my application, of course, but I also intentionally delayed my admission until the last possible moment. Texas A&M uses rolling admissions, so I had all of Texas' best and brightest zipping to the front of the line ahead of me. I submitted a very poor essay. Not in terms of its content, but I want back and sloppied up some of the grammar. Not enough to be obvious, just a mess.

It did the trick, sort of. I had not been rejected, but I was put on their wait list. I did a good show of looking crestfallen. So, I went back to the drawing board and my mother suggested Sam Houston State University. They had just built the Dan Rather Building with a donation by the journalist of the same name. It's a place not too unlike my own home in some ways. A very conservative, small college town. A truly small town even - just around 45k residents. But unlike the pasture back home, we were far enough south and east to be planted firmly in the beautiful piney woods region of Texas. Once you get off the highway, it is tall pines that line the roads, making you feel as if you're driving in a pine forest.

SHSU's campus also felt like a forest. I drove up with my parents to apply in person that June. The campus is cozy and gorgeous, covered in pine needles in the autumn, and stifflingly humid in the summer. After a tour, I knew I would take SHSU as my Alma mater. I would begin Spring of 2007, having applied too late to really get ready for the fall.

Drifting along aimlessly

My parents moved in to the trailer in early July. I helped my parents move our furniture and our cats into my father's dream home. Like my mother's heart staying in NOLA, or mine in Big Bend, my father sought what I seek now - empty land beneath an open sky. We've both fallen prey to the siren's call of wide open spaces.

But at the time, I resented him. The only internet we could get was 56k dial up internet. I essentially had to quit World of Warcraft, which was sadly a huge deal to young Cat.

Both my parents worked, but I didn't have a job. It wasn't worthwhile for me to get a job in Bryan because of the drive. And there weren't many options in the two tiny towns our trailer was between. Not that I looked very hard - I was a slacker for those six months, while half halfheartedly looking into an empty job board.

Now that I type this out, I realize how much of a fucking punk I was. And not in the cool way, just kind of shitty.

I browsed game journalism sites during this time. I consumed lots of text based humor content during the day, watched hours of Comedy Central, and played video games all around the clock. I typically went to bed just around the time Comedy Central became Girls Gone Wild, and woke up well after my parents had left for work. I usually ate something out of the freezer for lunch. I had a modest credit card with a very strict spending limit - to 'build credit', which I stuck rigidly to. Not that I had any place to go, thus I had no reason to spend.

When my dad was off, I usually tagged along with him while he ran errands. I did try to be useful, even if I was bad at it. The long drive into town gave us many opportunities to bond over music, discuss events in the news, or just shoot the shit. It was the first time I felt a true thaw with my father. He and I had always been at odds given my effeminate nature, but we became close. We became friends.

Forming a friendship

My one semi-regular expense was to meet up with my best friend. We had been close all through high school, even playing Neverwinter Nights together a few times. Which we awkwardly had to schedule via email and in person discussions at school as we, for some reason, never exchanged phone numbers. We got over that when he went off to college the year before I did. We still mostly communicated through AOL Instant Messenger.

We regularly met in Bryan during weekends he came to visit his parents during that autumn. Usually Dairy Queen as he loves their chicken tenders (even back then, I was a foodie). We would spend the day together before he returned back to Dallas, and myself to Burleson County.

Most nights of the week, we played Diablo 2 together late into the night. It was a surprisingly manageable game for me to run on such slow internet. I looked up and planned my build during the day, and we would push or grind the that night.

A moment of realization

One night in October, I went out onto the front porch to let out the dog. The moon was full, and it was a windy autumn night - the perfect time for me, so I stood on the porch while my mom's dog did her business. I chanced to look up, peering up at the moon.

The grass was bathed in the lunar light. The moon was bigger than I had seen in a very long time. Spiraling out from the moon was a tapestry of stars weaving through the deep purple sky. I could see the light pollution far away from Bryan, but that was it. My aimlessness had been pierced by the night sky. When I brought the dog back in, I blurted my admiration for the property to my parents for the first and only time.

Later, in November, I was going to church. The nearby small town had a Catholic church, and I attended Saturday night mass with my family every week, followed by dinner at the only restaurant in town. Just as we were getting out of the car, I burst into tears. Both of my parents asked what was wrong, and I said I just needed a minute.

At that moment, my complete dissatisfaction with my life collapsed in on me. It was a brief moment of a mirage shattering all around me, revealing a single, ugly truth: I hated who I was. I hated my life. This was as good as life was ever going to be, and I still hated it. I resented that I had compromised on my dream college, pursuing my dream job, in my lonely mountain town. And I resented my parents for stranding me in the middle of nowhere.

I got under control before mass started, slipping quietly back into the pew to join my parents. We never spoke about it.

Hindsight

I was a brat back then. I was a brilliant and creative mind, but a slacker, and complete burden on my parents. I couldn't find the strength to advocate for myself. My resentment toward my parents was a hatred of myself. What always starts as a trip of nostalgia turns ugly once I remember the protagonist of those stories was myself at 18.

And it makes me angry that my dad died before that kid got their shit together.

I don't know what the point of me publishing this was. But thanks for reading all the same.