going (back) to california
I’ve been out of commission for a while. Soon I hope to try to write about why. In the meantime, here is a piece I wrote about a year ago, when I was making preparations to fly to LA for a writing retreat. It isn’t finished, because by the time I knew how it ended, I had already started writing poetry about it instead. That’s a whole different project now, so please enjoy this snapshot of last year’s problems, and thank you for bearing with me.
W
The air in my city is stagnant and damp, clinging to my skin like a wet shirt. Gothic spires, centuries old, glow like new under the rinsing stare of the sun. It’s June, and I’m in love, and I am going to California in one month’s time.
My focus has narrowed, out of terrified necessity. If I look beyond the moment I inhabit, I will go to pieces, and I will do something worthy of regret. They make carriage horses in New York City wear blinkers, so they don’t see the cars passing by them in the street. I have been to New York City. I have never been to California, and I have especially never been to Los Angeles, which in the popular imagination is the superlative to California’s adjective. I live in Oxford, and my workplace predates the Aztec empire, and I am almost convinced that when the Santa Monica sun touches my skin, I will crumble and collapse like the old-world relic that I am.
I am going to California to write, because I applied for a literary fellowship when I needed a reason to quit my job. (I quit the job anyway, and took another one, before I heard back from the fellowship.) I have built in five additional pre-fellowship days to my itinerary, because I am in love, and I don’t know what is going to happen when we’re in the same city for the first time. I am going to California as much to inhabit my own story as to write it. I am going to California because I need to know what happens next.
In the two weeks leading into my departure, I have been charged with organising three graduation day events. The students where I work will dress in robes and hoods and suits with Latinate names, and they will process. That’s the verb: to process. I will congratulate them, and help them change at the half-way point to reflect their new and improved academic standing. This is where I live, now that I am going to California. I live in every tick of the roll call, in every hood affixed to every gown. I live in every step I take in heels across the cobbles of my city, balancing as best I can, waiting for the moments to add up.
Shortly after we met three years ago, my last partner bought me tickets to see the band ‘The Mountain Goats’ in London. I listen to them often when I feel things I don’t know how to feel. Many of their songs are about going to places: Marrakesh, Alaska, ‘some damn English city.’ They wrote a song called ‘Going to California,’ but they never released it. Only years later would they record a sort of sequel: ‘Going Back to California,’ about the plane crash that killed Black Sabbath guitarist Randy Rhoads. Their lead singer shared it as part of a fundraiser for a local abortion access charity, back in 2016. I didn’t think about it very much at the time. Now, though, I am listening, and I am paying attention:
“Feel like I’m gonna crumble
What will become of us?
Take two weeks to think about it,
Get right back on the bus.”
I am going to California for two weeks, for the first time. I am not going back. I do not let myself think.