I never thought about leaving it.

The California light.

The light that stains every memory I have with golden honey, sweetening moments that should have been bland, dark, bitter even. It has this way of doing that. So when he told me how gorgeous the California light is, that it’s unlike anything he has ever seen, I looked closely.

This is what I found.

A CALIFORNIA KID

As a kid, I used to sit on the dark wood floors of my living room wherever the light pooled. It would shoot through the windows in perfectly defined rays, casting golden lasers through the mid-morning air. I can sill hear my mother vacuuming as I sat there, her singing barely audible as I watched dust particles float through the air wherever the sun gathered. I remember how it amazed me, all of the things we cannot see, all of the little particles that dance around us without us ever knowing. We never know what is right there in front of us, not really.

Not until the light pours in.

The light that I used to tell the time every summer of my life. I would read shadows, angles, measuring out the hours of my life with little hands that held nothing else in them. Not then, not yet. I drowned in it, all of that time, all of that light. I think that every dream I have ever had was born right there in those moments, right there in those shifting puddles of sun that I would chase for as far they would run.

It was how I knew that I had fallen out of love with the world as a teenager, when that light started to burn.

I loathed it. I loathed that I loathed it.

I used to breathe easier on cloudy days, far from the blinding light that felt more like a mockery than a comfort. I was a child standing barefoot in the sun’s embrace with my eyes following the black birds one moment, and an angsty teen hissing at it’s insistent joy the very next.

MEDICINE

As it happened, it was sunlight that fell around me one day in spring that made me realize how at some point, without even noticing, I had fallen back in love with the world again.

I was lying in the earth, feeling blades of fresh grass scratch my skin as I turned my face towards a sun that was falling right out of the sky. It was one of those moments that you remember for the severe suddenness of the whole thing. I started to smile. I realized that I was happy again, almost imperceptibly so, and then all at once. All at once it hit me and I couldn’t stop laughing.

I felt as if I were light itself. It was like coming home.

That was the spring I listened to records in a creaky old Craftsman house that was not mine as the dust particles from my childhood found me once more. This time not alone, this time holding what felt like my whole life in my hands as I reached them into the rays of light, watching them part the floating dust like the Red Sea.

I thought once more about all of the things we cannot always make out, even when we want to, even when we try. I always forget about that, the trillions of specks of imperceptible things just swimming through the air that we gulp all day.

To my surprise, when that house fell down, the light did not fall with it. It followed me all through the summer, bobbing on the ocean’s waves like diamonds as I surfaced with salt water still stinging my eyes from trying to see in the dark.

I was always trying to see in the dark, never wanting to accept that some things aren’t meant to ever be clear. It was the summer that I realized that trying to understand everything is a lot like opening your eyes under a turbulent ocean, wondering why it’s not clear like it is in movies.

It’s not like the movies.

I spent the next several years running around a sunny college campus, cursing the endless warmth that directly opposed the worlds of Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations that I spent most days falling into.

THE LIGHT THAT I HAVE LOVED

Now, somehow, I am apartment hunting in a city that is just as cold and moody as every world I ever longed for on the sun-baked concrete of those years, noticing the golden light in a new way.

I go for walks in the middle of winter and open my palms to the warm rays that spill into the streets. The sun is low, as close to the Earth as it will ever be. Maybe that’s why it feels so personal these days, like home, like love itself.

I watch it pool in the palms of my open hands like a million memories, each one telling a story of the light that I have loved.

Love, m.

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