Second First Impressions

Everything here is flat and wide and spread out. The buildings are squat, the streets are wide and black and busy, but there is a wonderful greenness all around. The air smells sweeter and feels cleaner. The napkins at restaurants are wider and more absorbent. There are toilet seat covers and paper in the bathrooms. The streets are devoid of paper scraps; fences and walls are not covered in signs announcing apartments for rent, services provided, and animals for sale. The sidewalks are wide. There are houses with green yards and two or three front steps and colorful doors. The sidewalks are smooth, monotone gray, easy on my shoes. The passersby are thick and heavy; I feel a natural inclination towards dislike when I hear them speak. Somehow my own language has become a stigma. The waitresses are nice, they smile all the time; they try to be helpful. The food is better but more expensive. I gawk at the prices on jelly jars and sigh at my grocery receipts. There are more trashcans. The dogs are all on leashes and there’s no shit on the sidewalks. There are no people lingering in open plazas, sitting in the shade. The youth is hidden away. At 2am, everyone goes home. We drive everywhere—our friends are spread apart, the restaurants and bars are spread apart. There is no late night bustle, no clumps of twenty-somethings drinking forties on steps or in front of bars. I haven’t seen the sunrise yet.

It’s sad how fast the magic fades, the magic of all these little things that once seemed so symbolic, so intangible and achy. I’m thinking about this as I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, so foggy and solemn, so big. I’m thinking about this as I lay in my big bed and feel very, very alone.  

"Home"

 

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.

The American Work Ethic

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Everything.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

            Building yourself up is not something you do with money or unhappiness. I want to build a self out of beautiful words and unforeseeable experiences. Strange and strong—I want to be like no other person you’ve met before. I want to be my own reverberating echo, a process of something like “freedom” and “truthfulness” and not in the sense of any cheap verbal honesty, but in the sense of fully inhabiting my own chameleon skin. Admit that you are not a person, neither the person you dream of, the person you long to be, the person whose mouth you speak through, you are a process just like:

            everything else.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

It’s based on a Dream;

            the Dream is not beautiful—

if you have the power to exist within an indefinite space with malleable rules and new visual/sensory possibilities that are impossible to even remember in a cognitive/conscious way according to the terms of waking memory—shouldn’t your Dream be at least beautiful?

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

America is not ours.

Here’s what wrong with the American work ethic:

Happiness should not be a novelty.