Howdy.

Happy Sunday.

Warm Santa Ana winds are blowing November through California as I try to sit still, in this moment, and tell you how it feels.

So, this is a raw, personal post for Sunday, the kind that I used to call “heart talk” when just starting this blog.

No big ideas or invitations for revolutions of the soul today, just me and you.

SANTA ANA

Santa Ana winds are a Southern California phenomenon that I’ve never given much thought because they have kissed my shoulders and flown through my hair for my whole life. They blow in and feel like home, where the air is simply suspended in sunlit hues of golden warmth that begin to dance imperceptibly around you, smoothing your hair and drying your lips to the state of a cracked desert floor.

The sun is low and warm, and you can somehow be both hot and cold in the same moment. Home and far from it all at once. Walking to my car today, I felt those winds blowing through my hair and thought of all of the warm gloves and hats that I need to buy for New York. I thought of how odd it is that I am swallowing sunlight and choking on dry air here, today, yet might be wearing gloves and puffer coats in a few months.

THIS NOVEMBER

Yet it’s November today. My favorite month. The month of exhalation, where all that’s left to do is enjoy the final scenes of 2023 before the curtain falls on another year. Another ending.

It’s hard to believe that it’s November, not because it’s eighty degrees and not because time makes no sense at all, but because I can still just feel the current of this day, last year, running right beneath this one. Like an angry downstairs neighbor tapping a broom against the ceiling, I can feel its pulse under my feet—tap, tap, tapping.

Remember me, remember me. 

Asking me to remember that it is there, was there, to tread lightly in areas where I might fall through, right into the memory of that yesteryear. Right into the arms of someone I didn’t love. Right into another week, another month, another year gone away.

Remember me, remember me. 

REMEMBER?

According to my journal, on this day, last year, I was sitting outside on my university campus, clutching hot coffee and pulling the sleeves of my turtleneck down over my hands. It was the day I met someone for tea that turned into sushi that turned into me, dropping their hand on the corner of some street I don’t remember, saying goodbye as the sky cracked open and brought me relief.

How different it all looks this year. Warm Santa Ana winds have replaced the bone-chilling ones that I recall from that day. They are dancing in my hair and making my eyes water. Or maybe it is walking through their nostalgic embrace on the way to my car, knowing how far away from those winds I will soon be that is doing that. How far away from anything familiar at all, and how richly, intoxicatingly tempting those unknowns present themselves to be.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL

It feels both less and more real everyday that I crawl closer to it. I received an email the other day asking me to confirm my application for graduation. To make sure my name was spelled correctly and to check if my mailbox is big enough for my diploma to fit through. They provided measurements and everything in what felt like excruciatingly comical detail. As if the hardest thing about getting your degree is the actual getting of it. 

How funny, the mundane simplicities that such large life events are reduced to when you are staring them in the face.

Yes, you are graduating college, you have read countless books and written a multifarious array of papers. You have attended an innumerable number of hours of lecture and participated perhaps too eagerly in the game that is scholarly discourse.

You have trudged across campus in the heat and in the cold and in the middle of the night to work late hours editing magazine essays, your essays, with a few mental breakdowns and broken apartments and crazy roommates and terrible kissers sprinkled in. You’ve stayed up all night reading and singlehanded funded your local coffee shops with all of your long hours spent typing out ideas and citing sources—but please—make sure that your mailbox is big enough for the paper that proves it all.

How strange. Yet considering that I picked up my last diploma in a parking lot with a fast food gift card attached to it that read sorry a global pandemic ended your senior year prematurely and that you won’t ever graduate, but here, have a burger, the whole mailbox thing is a real step up.

Will keep you posted.

Love, m.

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