Hi, here’s an essay on California. If you’d like to update your subscription to support this project financially, you can do that below. Either way, I appreciate you reading. xoxo.
+
An hour before sunset, we hike Corona Heights in our matching black oxfords. Mine are not yet as worse for wear. Dust covers them, but they’re sturdy. Annoyingly, I know I’ll write about this. So I make a joke that Dr. Martens should sponsor the newsletter. After this, I consider the decisions I’ve made that led me to right now. That I almost canceled the trip on premonition alone, bad dreams, seems silly now that I’m here. We’ve been busy walking, making smart guesses at the crossword that are actually nonsense. Forgetting that my phone exists. I’ve missed this even though I didn’t know exactly what I’ve been missing.Â
It’s been two days since I arrived. Almost ten years since I was last in California. I’m here again for one week. Without plans, without intentions. All the way across the country with more time than I know what to do with. I have no object permanence for the streets. No sense of direction, physical and personal. This is nothing new, when everything around me is new. At the top of the hill, the whole city becomes visible. Sprawl doesn’t scare me. It only gives me perspective.Â
+
it is beautiful out here.
Except for earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis, buying a house. Other than that, it is beautiful.Â
safe travels
I never ran more than two miles in the bay.
would be better if you were here
what’s your flight?Â
You guys like San Francisco better now
miss you
I will tell you everything and you can maintain an air of cool coastal intellectualism Â
+
How to mark difference?Â
The produce is certainly better. Berries that actually taste how berries should. Six dollars for very normal dry pasta. People make eye contact. Say hello and sorry for picking the same direction when passing on the sidewalk. The streets are clean, the noises far more muted. Everything feels older even though it’s a younger city. Self-driving cars that terrify me more than erratically driven cabs. Stores, restaurants, bars close early. Looking at the still flowering trees here, it’s as if I’ve never seen a plant before. All this strangeness is a trick mirror. If I resisted my impulse to compare, I would lose a sense of permanence that calls me home.
+
The thing is, I haven’t been sleeping. Not since before I left. The last night in Brooklyn before the trip, where everything seems both ten years in the future and ten years in the past compared to here, I stayed up too late thinking that would serve my travels better. I would outsmart jetlag. Charlotte and I danced like teenagers to the punk band my friend plays in. We walked through Williamsburg splitting our sides with laughter, then speculating about what the days apart would hold. I worried. I worried in my mind and I worried out loud.Â
On the plane, I slept fitfully. Waking every time my seat neighbor laughed at the Marvel movie he was watching. I tried not to be annoyed. When I landed, I realized I hadn’t communicated my flight information. I had communicated very little. I’d done this on purpose, in an effort to be less needy after days of wondering whether or not I should take the trip. This makes very little sense, I understand that now.
The days following, when it’s time to sleep, I can’t. My caffeine intake is limited to morning, yet my circadian rhythms seem to have different plans. I’m not sure my body knows what time it is. It’s not on East Coast time as much as it’s not on West Coast time. I don’t fight it like I do at home. Give myself over to my non-present exhaustion. Whatever noise there is doesn’t impact whether I sleep or not, because I’m not sleeping anyway. I lie awake and think only of all the last times for everything.Â
+
When I was a kid, being away from home usually didn’t work out for me. I couldn’t sleep over at a friend’s without being up all night. I’d be the first one to venture downstairs to the kitchen. My friends’ parents would watch me with compassion because of course, they knew far more about discomfort than I had the words for at the time. My stomach would without fail ache. I waited until my parents would pick me up so I could go home, sleep absent in my body.
That same anxiety persists as an adult. I don’t travel well. In almost every airport security line I’ve been in, a terror strikes me when I realize I’ve left something critical at home. I’m nervous to leave my cats. Overpacked and under-planned. Whatever spontaneity exists in my heart is reserved for exploring my own city, so little about travel excites me.
The only thing that has changed about my homesickness is my increased desire to sleep over in my friend’s beds. It’s a secret no one told me about adulthood. You can and should sleep with your friends (in both senses of the word, but here I’ll only praise the literal rather than the euphemistic). I do this in New York often enough that it has come to feel like traveling in some ways. The whole ordeal is special. Falling asleep then waking together. I love showering at their places. Using their things. Being touched by them at times of the day we’d usually be apart. It’s comforting to know what friends are like when they sleep deeply, especially when I don’t. This is a ritual to know them in a different way. As if they’ve moved to a different state and it’s the first time I’m seeing them in months.Â
+
When I find Perry in the store a few hours after I arrive, it’s the first time we’ve been together since he moved. He hugs me and says, you’re a real person again. And in ways he didn’t even mean, I am.Â
+
This morning, I walk down Scott Street. Of course I listen to the song. It’s almost too perfect. Feels prescient. A future soon. I hope you believe me when I tell you that I’m not trying to self-mythologize. I find my own fictions more amusing than fascinating (I still think of Madeline’s text from months ago: Libras and their fictions.) I don’t think I have particularly interesting thoughts even though I know I’m prone to overthinking. I’m familiar to myself, not a stranger or mysterious. Even when I don’t know why I am the way I am, I understand.
Of course other people are strangers. And in their strangeness is their mystery. Even if they don’t mean to be mysterious or elusive. I remember a few months ago after I thought what was once unclear was suddenly clear. I woke up with another realization. Nothing has changed, not really.Â
A stranger I knew best. It’s a paradox in a song that represents a sad time in my life. But it captures the way everyone you love is a stranger to you once any distance accumulates or any time at all passes. Â
+
Many of my greatest friends are from here. Or at some point, lived here. When I try to count them, the number exceeds the fingers I have. To be here without them is its own strangeness. Hints of them in the city blocks they must have once been at some chapter in their own stories before they let me write them into mine. I romanticize them because they are romantic. I also wish I could gather them all at once, all meeting face-to-face again or for the first time. Strangers that are my friends who will become—in my imagination or in time—friends.Â
+
I am trying to imagine life here as we climb the hill. There’s a chance, in some years’ time, that if I continue to work in tech, that I will need to move out here. It’s both difficult and easy to imagine. I almost say it out loud, but don’t—is depression cured out here? The wind is high. I don’t let myself wish for any other weather. I’ve changed my clothes multiple times in an effort to match it. My wrists are covered in perfume samples from an expensive store on Valencia Street. Full because of a flaky pastry and half a sandwich from a bakery that more than one person recommended. Fingers sticky with aloe I picked from a median for my friend’s sunburned nose. I’ve pretended to belong so thoughts don’t intrude.Â
Once you’ve started up a hill, there’s no reason to stop. Close enough to the top that pausing only delays an inevitable satisfaction. Calves aching, sweat gathering at the base of the hairline, chest rising and falling rapidly. To catch your breath means you’ve won because that will mean you’ve reached the top. Then of course, whatever the view is, you’ll probably describe it as breathtaking. Another paradox. Language and reality contradicting each other. I can almost feel it, or it’s the altitude turning my head. We keep going. Stopping signals a defeat I’m not willing to admit.  Â
this is such a silly question but how do you make this many lovely friends? i am in my first month at college and i'm scared i'll never find any. it is all i have ever wanted. you write so beautifully.