california
I wrote this six years ago.
I sent this out yesterday, but Substack was having problems, so you probably got an empty email. This is try #2.
Lately I meet the day every morning with the same thought in my head: If I wake up here one more day I will have stopped existing, finally evaporated into that puff of smoke I feel I have become, completely immaterial, impalpable.
Living in California means that eventually, your ego will die. This is to say that you will become untethered from anything that ever held you still from within — the constellation of associations, of personalities, likes and dislikes; it was tenuous to begin with and so one fuzzy link going missing is about all it takes for you to be suddenly suspended, diffuse.
This is what they call being free. At first it is very scary because it is as though you are become nothing. Nothing is not a good thing to be when you are surrounded by everything, as is the case in California, which is full of everything. Living in California feels as though the sublime is closing in around you in the form of a deep, unctuous voice reminding you that you are nothing, that everything you will ever be is a piece of shit compared to the mountains or the sky or the ocean or a rock.
But it’s okay. Eventually, all of those things move in, a new constellation to replace the one which has been plucked from you, and that’s fine. The things that made you up were not special in the first place. They are gone and in their place is mountains, the sky, the ocean, a rock. You are become nothing and everything. You are sure that if you died tomorrow, no one would miss you, how could they, you are already everywhere.
It’s no wonder that people lose their whole minds in California, follow cult leaders who are nothing more than their neighbors. When everything around you feels positively Colossal, you need to fabricate reminders that you are indeed made in His image, not nothing, something, not nothing.
One day in California, I go to lie down for a nap and as my head is falling toward the pillow, I think “I might die during this nap.” I see the thought crossing from one hemisphere of my mind to the other; I see how big it would’ve been, anywhere else. I see how small it is, here, where my 400-square-foot studio apartment is barely holding me in place, where when I open the front door the whole earth comes crashing down onto my head. I shrug. I flip onto my stomach and sleep, do not die.
It later occurs to me that maybe it’s because I am heartbroken that I’ve had this thought. The relationship had to stop so the love could keep going, or something like that, keeps appearing in my head and in my diaries. It must be true, because I am not thinking about it, it is just there.
Okay, so maybe I am heartbroken. More devastating than the heartbreak is the realization that it doesn’t matter, that I could walk into the Pacific tomorrow, and it would swallow me whole, and maybe some people would be sad for a long time, but the ocean would still outlast their grief.
More devastating even than that is the irreconcilability of the fact that yes, the ocean is immense and vast, but so are we, and there is no competition.
One day, I go to the ocean with a friend who grew up landlocked. I ask her if she also feels relieved when she is reminded of how tiny she is. I don’t think she understands the question. I watch the waves crash in, over and over. I look toward the horizon, think about how far the water extends, and how much farther still that I cannot see. The water looks black, dense, like it could kill me. Thank God I am so small, I think.
Now the heartbreak is closing in on me, hard to extricate from the sunlight that’s closing in on me, too, that doesn’t appear until the middle of the day when it then beats down, relentless, until it doesn’t. I wonder sometimes if the vastness of the physical world around me makes me feel more, or less, human. Does it make my pain more, or less, acute? Does it make it pathetic and puny, in the comparison? Or does it make it huge, and brave, that it could even think to hold a candle to this absolutely pure sublimity?
You have to admire the gumption of a broken heart. No one can even see you, I want to say.
Meanwhile, the landscape is all I can see; even when I close my eyes the sunlight makes its way through the film of my eyelids.
I go on a hike with two friends and have to focus, closely, minutely, on my feet as they hit the ground right in front of me, because if I look up or around, I will be absolutely bowled over. A friend tells me I am very sensitive to beauty. I tell him the last two words of that sentence are extraneous.
I am not sure now what it is that’s hurting me. What is huger, my heartbreak or this fucking state? This question exhausts me; I am incapable of doing much. I make up excuses to leave work meetings early. I let friends take me to dinner. I sit on their couches and watch movies half-heartedly. I don’t do anything for anyone for months. I do the laundry, wash dishes. Everything smells damp, all the time. I try to avoid looking at things, especially nature, too closely.
Something is going to kill me. I cannot yet tell what. Is it the thing inside of me, or the thing outside?