The Naked Jungle
Once the dust settled and the closet began to resemble something like a room, I did what I’ve always done when cornered: I went outside to see the shape of the cage.
The street split itself cleanly in two directions, each one telling a different story and neither of them particularly comforting. Down one end, the place looked like a rough border town that had drifted north and decided to stay. Storefronts crowded together with hand-painted signs written entirely in Spanish, metal grates pulled halfway down, windows filled with neon beer ads and sun-faded posters. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t welcoming either. It had the posture of a place that minded its own business and expected you to do the same.
Turn the other way and the scenery morphed again, like someone had changed the channel without asking. Old buildings lined the road in low grade Googie architecture some with unnervingly cheerful pastel color palettes that did not look right against such a depressing landscape and atomic-age optimism long since stripped of context. A biker bar squatted low and unapologetic, its parking lot scarred with oil stains and rugged nostalgia. Nearby sat a tow truck company that looked permanently open, like trouble kept office hours there. A few blocks over, improbably, was a small apple-pie pocket of homes built in a rustic, almost storybook style, as if someone once tried to carve out a gentler idea of America and forgot to finish the job.
The contradictions continued to stack up fast the more I explored. Even the buses didn’t belong to a single era. One rolled past me looking like it had driven straight out of the mid-20th century with its rounded edges, refurbished metal, colors that hadn’t been fashionable since Eisenhower. When I finally climbed aboard, curiosity got the better of me. I asked the driver why her bus looked like that in 2026.
She shrugged and told me the city wanted to preserve old history. Give the buses a second life.
That answer stuck with me longer than it probably should have and while this was an environmentally friendly/ budget friendly thing to do...it cemented the fact that my town was utterly and completely stuck not only in the past but in a dense fog of confusion in terms of its identity.
Everything around me felt like that repurposed, patched together, half-preserved and half-forgotten. A place where time didn’t move forward so much as just pile up. You could feel the danger around the place too with police sirens blasting every hour of the day and cop cars racing up and down the street constantly. From what I’ve seen in the 4 days I’ve been over here this place waits for people who are distracted, tired, or convinced they don’t belong anywhere better.
So, in light of everything I made a decision, if this was gonna be my holding zone, then I’d treat it like one. I’d make the most of the hours, not the scenery. I went back inside, sat on the edge of the bed wedged into that closet, and pulled up my resumes. The one for simple general labor and the one for writing / editing. I updated them line by line, sharpened things up and trimmed off the fat.
Next step will be asking around nearby shops, service places, anywhere within walking distance that might need an extra pair of hands. Nothing grand. Nothing permanent. Just enough forward momentum to keep me from sinking even further into the mud.
The place didn’t need to be safe. It just needed to be survivable for the time being or so I keep telling myself.
And as long as I keep my focus on the prize and exit this stretch of road, with all its mismatched scenery and quiet oddities, would remain what it was meant to be: a passage and not the final destination.
