You sit on the front porch with your early-twenties mom and your two siblings eating a watermelon in defiance of the suffocating August heat. She teaches you to put salt on it, and it becomes a habit you will never be able to kick. You accidentally swallow a seed, and your mom tells you that a tree is now growing. One day, you’ll wake up for kindergarten and a sapling will be poking out of your belly button. Arkansas begins growing in you before you get to decide if you want it growing there.
You can't understand it by passing through on I-30 or rooting for the Razorbacks. You don't get to pick it up, turn it over in your hands, and decide what it is.
You have to spend your summers barefoot in the warm dirt, telling your grandma you can almost smell the honeysuckles and asking if she’ll please put calamine lotion on your mosquito bites. You have to wait until dusk to catch lightning bugs in jars, small and holy and now doomed, then climb onto the roof and tell the same girl you’ve been friends with since fourth grade that you can’t wait to leave. She agrees and you continue the conversation under the pretense that if you say it enough times, a plane will show up in your front yard and open the door to let you become someone else.
You need to roll your eyes at the thirty-minute drive into town, then move away one day and realize how much light pollution there is in the rest of the world.
Kids born in California, New York, and Hawaii have so much to look forward to. So many versions of themselves they can become. All you’ll ever be is you. And everyone knows you. And your dad. And your grandparents. And everyone else you’ve ever known. Because, as it turns out, you are actually not the first person to ever know someone. You are part of a long, complicated sentence that started before you got here. At fifteen, this is some sort of terrible death sentence truth to learn of.
And the funniest thing about Arkansas is that it never actually tries to win you over. It's just here if you need it.
But there is this undeniable feeling that life is happening somewhere else without you, and you have a lot of catching up to do. Everyone else got a head start and all you got was a bad education and bug bites. So you leave.
And everything you wanted to escape becomes some longing comparison to everywhere you'll ever go.
There is no more warm dirt under your bare feet. No honeysuckle hanging in the heat. No creeks where you know exactly which rocks to turn over to find the crawfish. And nobody anywhere else knows you.
Somewhere along the way, Arkansas took root in you. In the part that still believes a porch can be a place of worship, that a creek can raise a child, and that a salt-covered watermelon seed might still be sitting somewhere in your belly, there lies Arkansas.