Hi from California. ❤

I wrote this on the plane in a single breath, stream-of-consciousness style that I never intended to actually keep. But I think that sometimes the most of ourselves is hidden within those messy scratches of ink. So here is what was in my heart, thirty-five thousand feet up in the air.

WHERE I WAS FROM

When I first read the title of Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, the wording stood out to me. It seemed strange. It seemed strange to say where I was from, past tense, because aren’t you always from that place? But then I left where I was from. Which happened to be the same place that she was from. And I was walking around a bookstore three thousand miles from home when I saw that title again. The one that I would recognize anywhere. And it made sense. All at once and out of nowhere, and perhaps without much right to considering I had not actually moved anywhere, it made sense. Once you leave, once you open your eyes to what lies beyond the familiar, you understand why she spoke in the past tense. The “I” becomes the you that you were. The you that grew up in California with her bare toes in the sand. The you that dreamed of fall leaves as pumpkins rotted all around you. The you that thought that the hill just beyond the street that she grew up on was as big as the world would ever be, as big as it would ever need to be. And then it wasn’t. It was suddenly stretching out for miles and miles and you swear that you could see the earth curve from all of that space before you. And from there, from that moment on, California becomes the place that you were from. Now you are beginning to be from here, from there, from everywhere, if you do it right. I hope to do it right.

But it’s a strange thing, an unusual thing. A thing that you didn’t imagine like you did with so many other milestone moments of your life. I never sat on the swing set as a kid and dreamt about the day where my home would not feel like my entire world anymore. You don’t imagine that. You don’t imagine things that extend that far beyond you, not at first, not when they are that large. But then it happens. You’re twenty-one and you could have sworn you were eleven yesterday and you realize that we might all just feel that way. That that feeling might be one that never goes away. Pretending, until it’s real. I was pretending to be an adult and now I am one. California was the entire world, and now it is the place that I was from.

EXPANDING WORLDS

It’s no surprise that we thought we were the center of the universe. It’s not surprising that when asked, humans put themselves right in the middle of it all. We thought that everything else must come from us, must revolve around us. That our lives were surely the well from which the world drank. But then, low and behold, we learned that we are just one tiny speck of dust in a vast sea of cosmos that has no beginning, no middle, and no end. Well, not as far as poetry is concerned anyway.

I know these things because when I was about sixteen I was utterly obsessed with astronomy. I thought that my sadness was poetic if it was also the sadness of the stars. I researched it. I read books. I listened to dorky podcasts about stellar fusion and nucleosynthesis and other exotic scientific processes that thrilled me as I fell asleep at night. I found them to be brilliantly poetic and powerfully cathartic. Stars are born in the midst of their own collapsing chaos. Diamonds form under pressure. And then there’s the Phoenix and a dozen other strange moments of nature that coincide with our own. We are not separate from them. We are not different. We are just the same. I saw that and I loved it. I used it to survive those years like some angsty, melodramatic weapon. It made me feel connected to something that I could hold onto when all else felt like it was swirling in a storm around me.

THINGS THAT DON’T EVER DIE

I don’t read those books or listen to those podcasts as often anymore. I don’t stay up all night staring at Orion’s belt or contemplating the utter smallness of this world. But it’s still inside of me. I read this poem the other day, or whatever you call the lovely little blurbs of prose that one finds on the internet, that talked about the way that we romanticize sadness as teenagers. Something about being so angry and so sad and so desperate for love at sixteen but then you grow up and it doesn’t feel so romantic to be that angry anymore. That angst wilts in the light of day and you feel this need to handle things, not worsen them. I get that. I get that I often feel too old and too grown up to be pouring over Plath like a bible, but then I read the second part. The part where another person cuts in and says, no, that girl doesn’t ever die. She’s always inside of you. And that got me. The Russian nesting dolls of our past years and how they stack inside of us. Every person we have ever been giving life to who we will be. Sometimes I hear a song in a coffee shop and it awakens something in me that I thought I left on a beach somewhere four years ago, but there it is. Still right under my skin, sensitive to the touch.

I think that’s brilliant. How else would we ever be able to tell that anything was real?

Love, m.

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