How to Eat P Terry’s

Start with the end of a concert. 11 PM. Staggering to your car from the mosh pit, covered in sweat and glitter and a little bit of smoke, the magic still trailing behind you like an oil spill, iridescent in the street light.

Chug a bottle of water as soon as you get to the car to soothe your throat, raw from when you screamed the lyrics the way you dreamed, with the whole crowd, right back at the lead singer, who watched you with sparks dancing in his eyes as you lit yourself on fire.

Drive the scenic route through downtown: the city lit. The meandering homeless on North Lamar, the raucous energy emanating from 6th, the neon glow of South Congress. Make your way along the river, out in front of the Long Center, where you go every winter to watch ballet, where you can stand and see the city’s whole skyline. Austin, a city that tried to eat you alive, but you clung to its teeth, fiercely, in late shifts at the Y and the Kohl’s down in Sunset Valley, in nights crying your bleeding heart into the steering wheel, until you climbed out of its mouth and onto its face and became another feature. You were part of it.

Austin, you moved to this city because you wanted something to finally happen to you, and it did. Even now, when you drive through it, you feel the possibility jolt through you, like that top-of-the-hill feeling, like you’re about to fall in love.

In the front seat, you turn to your best friends beside and behind you, fanning themselves from the heat, singing along softly to Disney songs on the radio, checking their Snapchat messages or whispering the directions to you from their phones. You would never have had a life like this if not for your friends, one of whom you followed to Austin, the other you found here, the shining beacon amid the wreckage of an almost true love, the only truth you found in a city that defines itself as gritty hiking trails and glamorous nightclubs, beautiful and hungry.

The P Terry’s opens before you. You order a cheeseburger with the special sauce that’s 20% mayo even though you hate mayo and 20% ketchup and 60% pure Austin, pure this night. Fries that nearly sizzle when you take them out of the bag and dip them in your shake. You smash the burger against the steering wheel as you peel out of the parking lot, back across the river. Back home.

You and your friends will stumble into your apartment with grease-stained bags and assemble on the floor and the couch, and you’ll put on something light and full of hope and optimism, like Tangled or The Lizzie McGuire Movie, something to remind you of the children you were before you slam-crashed into adulthood, something to take you away from the wreckage you danced on this time, this show, another night where the city lights got mistaken for stars, but you survived anyway.

And you will stay there, smoldering, but just for now. In a year, you’ll leave for graduate school, where none of the fries are good enough, where the concerts are just twangy country artists who never got you the way these guitar-laden boys did, where you’ll send texts and memes instead of soft ‘good mornings’ in the kitchen, where you’ll become instead of always becoming. Like shrapnel, you and your friends will dissipate into the rest of Texas, and it will be impossible to draw you together again.

All that distance. All those new scars to replace the old ones you got here, in tattoo parlors and on dance floors, where your hearts were fragile and beating and burning to be broken.

When you finally get together again, after the show, the glitter still clinging to your eyelashes, you’ll always end up here, the center of Texas, the capital of all your daydreaming. And this gritty, beautiful, increasingly gentrified city will feel different in most places, but this will be the same, this streetlit downtown, this drive thru. 

Like true love and punk rock, P Terry’s might be bad for your health, might be only available in serendipitous snatches, when the astrological star charts of career, family, and school align. It might leave you hanging. But it never leaves you alone for long.

Jasmina Kuenzli (she/her/hers) is an author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She has been published most recently with SkyIsland Lit and The Account Magazine. When she isn’t writing, Jasmina can be found running, choreographing dance routines to 2000s club hits, and making fun of the Bachelor franchise. Follow her on Twitter @jasmina62442 and on Instagram @jasminawritespoetry.