Words by Larry McMurtry

Houston was my companion on the walk. She had been my mistress, but after a thousand nights together, just the two of us, we were calling it off. It was a warm, moist, mushy, smelly night, the way her best nights were. The things most people hated about her were the things I loved: her heat, her dampness, her sumpy smells. She wasn't beautiful, but neither was I. I liked her heat and her looseness and her smells. Those things were her substance, and if she had been cool and dry and odorless I wouldn't have cared to live with her three years. We were calling it off, but I could still love her. She still reached me, when I went walking with her. Her mists were always a little sexy. I felt, in leaving her, the kind of gentle fondness you're supposed to feel after passion. It was the kind of gentleness I never got to feel with Sally. Its expression might be stroking a shoulder, or something. I had had such good of Houston, she had dealt so generously with me, always, that I walked and stroked her shoulder for an hour or two, in the night. Then, when she was really sleeping, I went home. I wanted to be gone before she woke up.

Texas was there, beyond the sunrise, looming as it had loomed the day I left San Francisco. "It is your land," Wu had said, but Wu had never seen the great sky that opened above me. It was the sky that was Texas, the sky that welcomed me back. The land I didn't care for all that much -- it was bleak and monotonous and full of ugly little towns. The sky was what I had been missing, and seeing it again in its morning brightness made me realize suddenly why I hadn't been myself for many months. It had such depth and such spaciousness and such incredible compass, it took so much in and circled one with such a tremendous generous space that it was impossible not to feel more intensely with it above you. I wanted to stop at the first filling station and call Jill to get her to come to Texas. No wonder I hadn't been able to make her love me in San Francisco. I couldn't feel anything in a place where I hadn't even noticed the sky. Maybe I hadn't been very loving -- I couldn't be sure.

from All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, pages 62-63 and 176