death & texas

“It’s funny, leaving a place, ain’t it?” he said. “You never do know when you’ll get back.”
-Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

When I left Texas for good the only tarot card I could pull was Death. Wine drunk in my friends living room: Death. Alone in my new apartment in North Carolina: Death. I had gotten into tarot skeptically, but the cards seemed to know something about me. Leaving Texas was a kind of death. 

The Death card doesn’t literally mean you’re about to die; it usually indicates that you’re going through a transition, the end of something. Part of you is dying, the lore goes. A relationship, an old sense of self, an actual person. In the summer of 2021 I was leaving Texas, leaving a job, leaving a gender. As Covid-19 seemed to be receding with the release of vaccines, I was packing up all of the things I’d scattered around my parents’ house in rural north Texas over the course of a year spent mostly indoors. I didn’t know when I would come back. 

Every other time I’d tried to leave, no matter how permanently, Texas kept drawing me back. As a high schooler, I dreamt of out of state schools, leafy campuses in the old South and Northeast, but I fell in love the first time I walked on the campus of the University of Texas. When I graduated from college, I left on an around-the-world missionary program with the goal of finding the country I would expatriate to. When that fell apart, I came back to Texas. I moved to Seattle for a service year program. When the gray Pacific Northwest weather turned into constant gray in my mind, my dad flew to Seattle and helped me pack up my car. We drove for three days across mountains and desert until the landscape turned into the high West Texas plains. After two years I tried to leave again. I left everything that didn’t fit in one small Brooklyn bedroom behind and left again, sure that this time I was leaving Texas for good. Three months later the first covid case was detected in New York, and six months after coming to the city I was back in Texas again. 

Every leaving felt permanent when I set out. Every time I crossed the Red River I thought it was the last time I would live on Texas soil for years—maybe forever—and I was happy. I was not born in Texas: until my brother and I, my family was seven generations of Appalachians. But still something about Texas has stretched up out of the red dirt and limestone to root me in place. 

I don’t mean to ever live in Texas again. But Texas has a gravitational pull I have only ever momentarily escaped. This is what I mean when I say these are essays on the inevitable. 

The summer of 2021 was also the last time I sent a newsletter. Maybe a reintroduction is in order: my name is Carter Jude Surbaugh. We probably met on twitter, or you’re here because of my mom. I like Moby Dick, Julien Baker, the Prayer of Humble Access, and Dr. Pepper. You can call me CJ. 

I’m starting a newsletter again because I miss having a place for my recursive obsessions: the things I find myself returning to again and again, the places I thought I’d left behind. That, and also if I don’t share my thoughts on the internet I will die. I don’t have social media anymore so I return to the humble blog. This (occasional!) newsletter will probably mostly be about books and God and Texas–my own personal inevitabilities. 

I hope you’ll enjoy these notes in your inbox, but if not (or you have no idea why you’re receiving this), you can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of this email. 

Until next time, Texas forever.