I can see what you were Centuries ago, Cibolo: The ground thundering as the Buffalo stampede throughout the land and the Native folks sing their war cries like wild banshees and the mustangs stride passionately through the plains. All that remains of those days is the creek that flows through the edge of this land.

Time has washed the past away; no more tee-pees and peace pipes. Nor Arrowheads and medicine men. No more herds of cattle grazing the land lazily. The open fields have now become house after house, each looking like a replica of the last.

I left you for a time and flew away like a nested hawk. I soared to distant lands out into the unknown. My wings have carried me to college campuses, football coliseums, across vast bodies of water into foreign cities and back to the southern lands of America, the Beautiful. Oh, the places I have been. Still, none like you, Cibolo. No longer do I seek the glory of the gladiator I once was but now I seek quiet and calm from the turbulence of my own mind. I sit beneath the shade of your branches with a journal and scribble words down furiously because I am angry.

Home is supposed to be an oasis even for my nomadic heart, but instead I feel like a foreigner in my own land. This community is so essential to who I am but it feels so distant. I miss the quaint, the small, the familiar. I long for what I feel has been stolen from me. Inside of my heart jealousy flows through me like it flows through a man who is afraid his lover will be absent one day for another who is better than he. Like a pessimist, I complain about the construction and expansion. Because Cibolo, I want not to be forgotten by you.

You used to smile at me as my tired wings would beat against the turbulent winds of the world. You were my haven when I needed rest, comfort, and solace. In those days I sat beneath your branches and would breathe in your roots — our roots. You would welcome me back home as I exited 178 and drove down memory lane. But tell me Cibolo, have you forgotten who I am? Have I vanished from your mind? Or is it me who has lost touch with who I am and forgotten you once I left my perch and flew out into the world searching for something that would bring permanent contentment to my restless desires and my searching heart.

These days, I walk around the hallways of Steele high school as a teacher and try to remember who I was, who you were, and who we have become. I remember being prideful and arrogant. Concerned with football and the little ladies. It was simple then because I thought I knew who I was; everything everyone else wanted me to be. But can you blame me when it’s so much easier to fit into the mold and settle for who you are suppose to be. It hurts less. But now, I am nobody. My home is nowhere. My family is in the sky, taking shape as the white clouds that blow wherever the wind takes them.

I am like you Cibolo; Forever changing, forever growing, forever collecting memories that settle in the mind like boxes in the attic collecting dust until we revisit them. Things may never be the same, and that is exactly why they will always be the same.