꩜ Shopkeepers, aunties, omens

shopkeepers, chosen aunties, small kindnesses, omens, the hustle in a capitalistic ass society, women holding down corners of the city that don't belong to them yet — somehow — do. ⋆˚࿔

Written on the ground

There's a version of Texas that gets sold to you before you arrive — big, loud, overly friendly to anyone who isn't from here. Which is true (I still stand on the hospitality being slightly different here.) What nobody tells you is how many women are quietly running the place. Not the version on the news. The real infrastructure. The corner store version. The someone-always-knows-somebody version.

That's how I met Auntie Sana.

Two East Coast girls, completely different on paper — different coasts, different countries even, different everything — who somehow ended up telling the same story back to each other. We both left home for reasons that made sense at the time. We both landed in Texas and had to decide whether to shrink or take up space. We both have endless dreams for family, both close and far away. ₊‧₊˚⊹

Sana got her nickname — fairy — from her father, back when she was still small enough for it to fit. Don't get me wrong, she's a very whimsical lady. She's Pakistani, she runs her shop like it's an extension of her own house, and she is, rightfully, proud of it. The samosas are absolutely the best I've had in Houston. The halal meat comes in fresh from Yemen. There's a hot plate rotating daily, whatever she felt like cooking that morning, and you eat what the day gives you. When her son was less than 48 hours old, she adopted him. He's eleven now. She talks about him the way you'd expect — like the whole shop is really just the thing she built around him.

My mom always said "it takes a village," and I don't think I really understood what she meant by that until I got to this age. Hidden infrastructures and all that.

I was in there the day a white man walked in and started asking her questions that weren't really questions — the kind dressed up as curiosity that are actually about entitlement. Why here. Why this neighborhood. Like she owed him the math on it. I watched her answer him anyway, patient in a way I wouldn't have been. And as he walked out, a bottle slipped out of her hand and shattered on the floor.

She laughed. Said in her culture, a bottle breaking is a good sign — it means whatever evil energy had been sitting in the room just left, and something better is already on its way in.

We both said it at the same time. Inshallah.

I don't share her faith, not exactly, and I couldn't tell you the full weight that word carries for her. But I know what it is to need a sign. I know what it is to take the universe up on an offering, even when you don't fully understand where it's taking you. So I said it too, and I meant it the way I meant it — as a hope. A shared reach toward the same good thing from two different directions. ⭑.ᐟ

I keep coming back to this — how two women who owe each other nothing end up building a shorthand out of almost nothing. A shared coast. A broken bottle on a Tuesday. It doesn't take much, and it never really has. The women really holding down this city aren't waiting on permission or paperwork to call each other family — baby, they just start doing it. Out loud, in the middle of a shop, in front of a stranger who was never going to understand what he interrupted.

Who protects a woman running a business alone in a place that keeps asking her to justify her presence in it? Mostly, it turns out — other women. Aunties who aren't blood. Sisters you didn't grow up with. The fairy who became somebody's mother in 48 hours and somebody's auntie in the time it takes to eat a samosa. ꩜｡

Still looking for the language for what this actually is: not friendship exactly, not family exactly, not anything I thought I might have needed in that exact moment, but something Houston keeps handing me anyway.

Playlist

Songs from the people

Collected in Houston, TX — Dispatch 02

mkautumn·3 songs

#Title⏱

1. 1En el muelle de San BlasManá6:38
2. 2Do You Mind (remix)Kyla, DJ Paleface, Crazy Cousinz3:22
3. 3Pretty EyesSunkis, Flo2:56

Field Notes from Texas · Dispatch 02 · Houston, TX