I’m back in California after what could very well have been the
most wonderful year of my life. Wonderful, yes, insane, chaotic, full of
lessons, full of scrapes and bruises, full of loss and gain in an endless
surging flow, sorrowful at times, surreal, unbelievable, euphoric, terrifying,
also. There is so much I haven’t had the time or the attention span or even the
words to tell you about. And now I’m back “home,” toying with that word like a
question in my mouth.
Northern California is a beautiful place—we are lucky to
grow up here, basking in the mild sunshine and the fresh redwood and ocean air.
When I returned I was struck by the expansive sky, spread out above the low
building tops, by the wideness of the smooth, black streets, the sidewalks.
Everything is low and flat and spread out, bordered by green. Everything is
square and new. The graffiti is painted over in stern squares. That image has a
lot to do with how I feel, with a certain specific blankness, a lack of
stories. I feel my bursting, booming, blooming year fading inside of me, as if
eroding upon exposure to this sweet foreign air. Was it all a dream?
There are things that feel right about being here, like
seeing my lover’s blue eyes up close, like getting behind the wheel of my
dusty, leaf-cluttered car, like my brother’s skinny ten-year-old arms wrapped
around me. I feel like I can sigh into California’s temperate embrace and sleep
off a year long accumulated hangover. But I also feel something missing—a big
gaping half of my heart. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t been overcome
with the urge to cry at strange moments, like at a stoplight, or while buying
cider at the grocery store.
In Spain time moved differently. Every moment felt full of
possibility. Life seemed like some wild undefined adventure, something to be
molded and tossed around, something to plunge into with open eyes and an open
heart. Every strange, surreal dream felt possible. Back “home,” all those
elaborate unconventional dreams seem impractical. I am being re-acclimatized to
something called stability. Routine. Planning. Where before growth seemed
spontaneous and personal, now progress seems like something to be charted out
on some kind of dull trajectory of compromise. This is called the future. Suddenly all your living is supposed to be stored
up for later—right now you must work to build options.
There is a Californian girl inside of me, and she knows how
to navigate this kind of lifestyle—she’s done it for many years. But there’s
another person, maybe new and raw and uncertain and incomplete but thirsty for
life and strangely strong and all of this change is pressing against her all
over, crushing her. Even on a purely geographical level, my options are
suddenly limited. I’m compressed into a cage of stale social roles and a lack
of travel possibilities. I feel like I left a certain kind of hole when I left,
and now I’m supposed to come back and fill it, but I’m not the same shape
anymore. I’m trying to find a place where I have room to move on, but also to
acknowledge that so many amazing things have transpired in the past year, and
to find a way to examine how these things have affected the trajectory of my
life and who I am as a person.
