She looked at me with those unflinching, bureaucratic eyes and said, I’m going to have to keep this. You can’t have both.

I’m standing in front of counter ten at the DMV, getting my New York ID. In this woman’s hands rests my California ID, the one featuring me at freshly sixteen with bright eyes and a shiny forehead.

Oh. Right. Of course. I watch her confiscate the card as she hands over my new one. California for New York. I trade one world for another.

PERSPECTIVE

I think you maybe only come to really understand a place once you leave it.

Like hanging art and having to stand back and look at it from the other side of the room with your head tilted to the side to really see it. I am standing on the other side of the country with my head tilted to the side, squinting at California, really seeing it.

When you’re in it, you can’t see the whole thing. Perspective requires distance and for twenty-one years I didn’t have any. I knew one world. I knew bohemian clothes and vegan food and sprawling beaches. I knew warm breezes and swaying palm fronds and bare feet. Hippies, surfers, people from Chicago who vowed that they would never leave a place like this. I knew the smell of the ocean and the taste of sunlight and after twenty-one years, I was choking on it. I was coughing up sunshine like blood, staring at it pooling in my palms and knowing I had to leave. So I packed up and moved to the antithesis of that world.

And it is here, swimming through that perfect antithesis, that I am coming to understand what it means to be from California. How where you are from leaves a stain on you that you just can’t ever scrub out. The longer you stay away, the more defined it becomes. The more distinct. The more obvious, perhaps.

LEARNING NEW YORK

That stain becomes a thing that becomes increasingly foreign. For the longer I stay in New York, the more natural it all becomes.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I catch myself changing. I see my reflection in the train window and do a double-take at the life that I still can’t really believe has become my own. It’s within those moments that I feel the distinction most clearly from where I was from and where I am now. Being from California becomes a sacred little flame that I cup my hands around when I feel this place changing me. In the windy tunnels of the subway that transport you so quickly and so blindly that you swear you don’t know anything, I find myself cupping my hands around that flame and protecting who I was first. Bare foot and sun-kissed and clawing my way out, I hold that kid in my hands and wonder if it is ever possible to keep all the worlds we love from bleeding right into one another.

DREAMS THAT SHAPESHIFT

So the dichotomy of home, of what it means these days, is something I find myself think about a lot. For a long time, my tentative plan was to spend my twenties in New York and then move back to California to a sun-filled craftsman home to raise a family. That’s what I told my mom anyway and she has definitely not forgotten it. And it’s a good plan. A good dream. But then I got here. Every morning I drink my coffee while watching parents walk their kids to school, little pink backpacks on every dad’s shoulder. I walk past the gorgeous, historically charming, brick warehouse of an elementary school and dream of sending my kids to a place like that. The kind of school I always wished mine looked like growing up. I imagine walking them to school under the ever-changing trees and I think—yes. Yes, this is what I want now.

But then I think of my childhood in California. Of pink taffy skies and and golden light that fell like dust onto everything in sight. Of the ocean and how it was always healing me. Of moonlight and palm fronds and windows that were never not open. Of driving. Of running bare foot in an oversized t-shirt down the honey-light filled streets with long, tangled hair trailing behind me and I think—don’t I want that for them? My very hypothetical children? Will there come a day when California pulls me back, sick of my city shenanigans? Will enough be enough? And will it feel like home?

VISIONS OF HERE & THERE

There’s a crucial distinction between the two places in that I was taught one like I was taught how to breathe, and I am learning the other like one learns a foreign language. Born into it, I learned California as I learned life. My mother taught me to garden and cook and my father taught me the ocean. There was always someone to hold my hands and show me what to do with them. How to place them into the earth and feel for fertile soil or how to press them together to dive under the waves. I knew things because people told me them. Never stand with your back to the ocean. I was brought up alongside it all and there is something sacred about that that I feel I will surely long to return to one day.

But there is also something sacred about where I am now, for I am learning it all on my own. It’s messy and exhilarating and chaotic and the coolest thing I have ever done. Everything I know, I am learning firsthand. From drill bits and bureaucratic affairs to train routes and health insurance. Street smarts and seasons and that rain in New York does not have a shred of the mercy that rain does in California. When I look at all of that, of all I have learned in three months, I think of how these are the days I will tell someone about one day. I think of how cool it would be to tell my Brooklyn kids that I moved here all alone at twenty-one and just figured it out.

I can see both so clearly. I can see myself standing on sun-soaked wooden floors, baking lemon cake on Sunday afternoons with the California breeze blowing in. I can see myself watching the waves and feeling that they contain the expanse of my entire life within them. I can see myself teaching my kids about the earth, placing their hands into the soil and showing them how to respect the ocean without being afraid of it. But running right alongside these spinning visions are the ones of me here, where the pumpkins don’t rot on Halloween and school buildings are old brick factories. Where art is on every corner and where the city teaches you more than you could ever learn behind a desk.

Home becomes a thumbtack that slowly gets moved all over the place until you look at your world and see that you suddenly belong to all of these different places, each one holding a piece of you. Each one a part of you. Like two ships in the night, these worlds pass right by one another in my head, close, but never able to touch.

Some things you have to choose. You can’t have both.

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