When California Makes You Sad

But you just can't leave

“He said he had California inside him the size of his heart.”
— Kyle Buckley, The Laundromat Essay

A friend’s apartment, San Francisco.

I turned eighteen, sick and nearly throwing up from a stomach bug, on a sidewalk somewhere in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Inside, Sufjan Stevens was hosting a maximalist Christmas concert — it was December 5th, 2012 — in a grotesque bubblegum pink unicorn suit, complete with papier-mâché head that bobbed as he warbled: I’m a Christmas unicorn! You’re a Christmas unicorn! The stage swam with streamers and glitter as the audience of mostly thirty-something white folks gyrated in slow motion, crossfaded on irony and actual holiday charm. I sat outside taking shaky breaths through my mouth, white-knuckling a plastic water bottle as the security guard observed me nervously.

I had come with a friend, more of an acquaintance really — a dorm-mate who was at that time still watching Sufjan inside. We were both children; it didn’t seem to matter where he placed himself, because my sickness was beyond both of our wits combined. I knew I’d be well again, that this was a temporary wind, something meant to pass over me if I became a small and dense thing. So I hunched in my chair and tried not to be afraid. Not of my sickness, not of the empty street, nor the slim grey-brown buildings on the other side of it, their shadows leggy in the streetlights. Everywhere the night blew around me: a wet grey blanket, all tatter without warp. Though I didn’t know it then, I already possessed all that was destined for me in California: the loneliness — often accidental; freak accidents of all kinds; my inner magnetism towards strangers, queers and spiritual outsiders; my stupid loyalty to beauty in all of its forms: to taking risks for beauty and only sometimes coming out on top.

And then there was this: how small I felt, how dwarfed by the immensity of the newness around me. I had felt big, back home in Ontario, a feeling that came with the place, with my achievement and obligations, with the admiration and expectations of others. At some point I had gone from feeling embedded in a lovely way to feeling too much belonging, as though the authority on who I was, what I was capable of, even what I wanted had begun to rest outside of myself. Sometimes I felt like I was playing a familiar character everyone else knew and loved, in a sitcom no one else wanted to leave.¹ Then, on the cusp of adulthood, I was determined to fly across the continent to feel small and invisible again. It was a brute solution, fit for a child. And it worked.

In California, I could finally disappear. No longer the star student, no longer the star of anything, lost in the churn of other people’s ambitions, tossed about like a loose barnacle or a bug… It sounds awful when I articulate it now — like a brief, icy nightmare — but at the time, it was exactly what I wanted. To be new, to be made new by experience. It might even be said that for some time, it became my only ambition: to not repeat myself.

By the time that I left, California had entered me completely, or so it felt. The way the moneyed Peninsula folk spoke, the sidelong glinting of their eyes as they made their plans; the dew in the mornings in the park, the smell of sweetgrass. The sedgy foothills always haunting the horizon, assuring as a persistent mirage is assuring: not because one believes in it, but because it is always there. The turning of the seasons like the subtlest turning of a lover’s face, in dimness. And all the different kinds of light: warm, generous as well as secretive, brooding and damp. It is a feeling that only a young person can have, surely: the feeling that no other place will ever matter as much as this one, and that no other time in one’s life will change one so deeply again.

The view from Altamont Road, Los Altos. A favored bike route.

In 2012, when I first arrived in California, I was absorbed mostly by the task of making friends. Relief was the dominant emotion of that era: relief that my chatty Canadian politesse meshed well with the flighty niceties of the West Coast. It was easy to like people, and to be liked in return; plans for coffee were made and evaporated like dream currency. If Southern California was the national capital of image-making, stardom and gloss, Northern California had a lax, lolling quality — a way of talking that swirled around you, swept you up with a shrug. My classmates arrived at Stanford in careful long-sleeved shirts and slacks but soon donned the uniform of rumpled T-shirts and flip-flops. We tossed around references to Plato’s Republic as easily as we did the latest revelation from Techcrunch: not because we knew what we were talking about, but because it felt irresistible to pretend.

The connection with the land came later. If I found Californian mannerisms intuitive, I found the land utterly alien, almost fantastical: taking long walks around Lake Lagunita at night, I’d breathe in the smell of sweetgrass in big, unending gulps, each more incredulous than the last. I didn’t understand how the night bruised purple sometimes, or the bulbous haze of a streetlamp could suddenly stop, as though the membrane between it and its dark surrounds could be clearly delineated, almost touched. I couldn’t parse the particular giantness of eucalyptus trees, their skin peeling in harlequin layers of tan, russet and brown, or the shameless hopping of the California jay, its back an undiluted blue, its eyes hard-set and impassive. Where the flora and fauna of Ontario had been tender, all juicy underbelly and unfurling leaf, the landscape of California was ornate and cryptic: agave like an armoured chest; the elegant gnarls of madrone trees zigging upwards as though through a grid of dry air.

Where was the rain? And the luscious, billowing clouds of lakewater? Where were the days of gloom, hooded in sleet? It seemed to me they had been swapped out for forces lighter and infinitely more mysterious, hidden in the air I breathed as spells of scent: the smell of jasmine, dust on the road. Hay and old coffee, salt and manure. I wanted to get lost in it; I hoped to be hypnotized, to be swept up into someone else’s mystical designs. More than anything, I wanted to be claimed by something larger than me.

And California always seemed poised to claim you, to engulf you entire and refuse to give you back. I heard it in the ways immigrated Californians would say, we had meant to just live here a year, but… and make a hand gesture indicating their sun-swept land, or ranch house, or weather-kissed landscaping. I heard it in the interminable folk songs and pop songs, the ways it seemed always fashionable to be missing California, or worshiping it, or resenting it.² California was our lover who wouldn’t let us go, but wouldn’t yield to us, either: a pair of burning eyes in the back of the room, a warm hand given then taken away. We returned because we knew her power, how easy it would be for her to give us what we wanted. We also returned because she never did. And oh, how we loved her for it!

If Southern Ontario, my home with its temperate forests and lowlands, was the realm of prose — of straight-talk and catching up with neighbours — California, with its marine forests and shimmering glimpses of the ocean, was recitative verse. The native tongue of promises, and not their fulfillment; the language of dreaming, and not ever quite receiving. In the language of the land one could, it always seemed to me, coax the living into the dead, and the dead into the living. There was earthly magic in the sage, the cypress, the chaparral, their smells heavy with secret ceremony. All was always possible and all was always near. One felt that one’s societal appointments — work meetings, silly squabbles and academic debates— were merely preludes to the inevitable day when one would walk naked into the hills and disappear. In different ways, in different dialects, we each dreamed of that day. California — its allure, its central promise — was precisely this: one always felt on the verge of vanishment, and because of that, everything seemed possible.

View of Stinson Beach, June 2020.

To believe oneself inconsequential is also to relieve oneself of the duty of ethical living. The Californians I knew often followed one of two paths: that of the dabbling artist — I’m nothing, so all is play! — or that of the serious empire-builder — I’m nothing, so it won’t hurt anyone if I get exactly what I want. Some classmates of mine even lurched between these, dividing their time between swing-dancing and closed-door meetings with investors, seemingly unable to decide if life was one endless game or a targeted campaign to pillage the future. I had friends who went on to found companies; others who absconded for the literal circus and the aerial arts. While on the surface, these friends appeared to have nothing in common, underneath they were remarkably similar, each having found something enormous to disappear into.

Perhaps it was even this idea — the idea that one mattered so little, that one was essentially dwarfed by forces in the land and sea — that birthed the contemporary Californian ethos. The ocean, the way it cleansed the shore and pulverized it into billions of tiny sand particles, cleaned too the cultural slate: everything is going to be destroyed anyway; we can make anything we want! Out there, on the other side of the Sierra Nevadas, it seemed a different set of laws applied. As though the old gods could not see or hear us, we set about creating a pantheon all our own.

In California, I was constantly meeting people who seemed to belong not to “real life” — its concerns for food and shelter, the purchasing of necessary accoutrements — but to some surreal comedy about all of humankind. There was M, who once sat across from me over lunch — Greek pitas, olives, hummus — in the shade of a table umbrella. “Dying,” he mused playfully, his sunglasses resting precariously on his bronzed forehead. “That’ll be such an adventure. I’m looking forward to it.” Or R, who, speed-walking with me around Dolores Park, explained with utter seriousness that his life goal was to “cure death.” When I told him I found the idea repellent, he asked me if I thought it was impossible. Not impossible — just not desirable, I tried to explain. He then lost interest immediately, like a balloon released by a child.

I was pitched new social media networks and cures for global hunger that involved growing pond scum for its complete proteins. I overheard funding conversations held over chocolate croissants and burnt espresso drinks, in a café imitating an imitation of Europe. I saw, then tried, then came to rely upon, the pale gruel of Soylent. And through it all I continued to get cardboard boxes shipped to my door, each one larger than the last, each one containing a larger portion of my life’s so-called necessities. None of this seemed bonkers at the time — just a bit unreal, only lightly brushed by the curse of implausibility. As though alienation were merely cosmetic, something we could sand away at any time like a thin coat of paint, we continued to buy things and make things for other people to buy.

Looking back, it all seems like such a waste to me now: living in the land of plenty, with so much to be grateful for, surrounded by the majesty of mountains and the literal ocean, we could have created anything. Why did we decide, with all the world before us, that the answer was “more technology”?

The view from somewhere, I forget.

Joan Didion begins her legendary essay on New York, “Goodbye to All That,” with this inimitable sentence: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”³ I did not decide to leave California all at once, but in intimations, hints — as though deciphering the life of someone long dead. I remember standing with you two years ago, J, underneath the cross of Jupiter and Saturn on the Winter Solstice; I asked you to make a wish and when you were done you told me, straight-faced, I’m done with California. This time next year, I want to be living somewhere else. That was how you told me you wanted to move, by telling the planets first.

Or — the inhuman beauty of Berkeley. The way the neighbors’ gardens made my head spin, the tiny flowers, the succulents and their gangly blooms, the billion monkeyflowers and larkspurs, poppy-this, poppy-that. I used to walk the same set of blocks around Josephine Street, until it hit me that the gardens were all the same, all arranged to create the distinct impression — and that’s all it was, an impression — of togetherness. I felt suddenly self-conscious, suddenly aware that here, the beauty had me at its center — and I suddenly longed for the frumpiness of Ontario, its rumpled ivy and endless mats of trampled leaves, the forest shabby and unbothered and not even stopping its gossip when you entered.

It was good to disappear, in my early twenties. My disappearance allowed me to find parts of myself that did not yet have visible counterparts — my queerness, my rebellion, my nascent experiments in living. These are the fruits of disappearance, the difficult questions you can ask when no one is around. But disappearing too can lead to becoming insensitive to your place in things, a false belief in the lightness of your own being. In the fog at the top of Old La Honda Road, you can forget that in fact, people do notice you — you do have a body, an existence, a heaviness that bumps around and shifts everything, shifts the entire world by virtue of its being a part of the great crowded everything.

When that happens, it’s probably good to return from the hills. To put on some clothes and shuffle meekly back into the markets, the courts of law. To take a long warm shower, no matter how numb you feel, and put the flower crown up on the wall for a while, right next to the map that shows you: YOU ARE HERE. It’s okay to allow yourself to be found again.

Bodega Bay.

Now, it’s been more than a year since I saw California last. At the time, my departure felt temporary, though indefinite — like a brief lover’s spat that was almost certain to resolve itself down the road. Having spent most of my adult life there, and never seriously imagining an alternative, I had no way of knowing this particular separation would come to feel final — not in the sense that I would never return, but in the sense that when I did, it would have to be as a different person. As intimate as we had once been, we would have to learn each other again, from the beginning.

While you are away
My heart comes undone
Slowly unravels
In a ball of yarn

The devil collects it
With a grin
Our love
In a ball of yarn

He'll never return it
So, when you come back
We'll have to make new love
—Bjork, “Unravel”

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Discussion Questions

Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, with other readers in the comments, or in the weekly reading group hosted by mda.hewlett@gmail.com.

1. Do you have a place that made you? What did it give you? What did it take away?

2. Are certain places much better in the mind than they are in real life?

3. Have you ever felt too found, and needed to get lost? What was that like? Did you get what you wanted, in the end?

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If you liked this post, you might like this piece on Pakistan or this piece on a Szechuan restaurant. As always, here is the complete archive of past essays.

1. The implication of my feeling then was that my peers were the problem — their lack of longing for new pastures. Of course, this could not have been further from the truth. Everywhere around me, other people were longing to change and grow, too — as people often do.

I would learn much later that I myself I was prone to give in, eager to please by telling the right stories. In a way, I had trapped myself with my habits, and my social world had merely molded to my repetitions.

2. One of my favourite songs in this tradition is Lana Del Rey’s “Fuck it I love you,” in which she croons: “So I moved to California but it’s just a state of mind / it turns out everywhere you go you take yourself that’s not a lie.”

3. Here is another incredible passage from that essay, part two of my bald campaign to get you to download / borrow / buy Slouching Towards Bethlehem right now and read it: “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”