2023! and so it begins.
Whatever "it" will turn out to be
Ian and I rang in the New Year at a local Buddhist temple where, not coincidentally, I hadn’t been in some time. I realize now that there was no point in 2022 that I could have sat in front of actual monks while pondering the ways in which desire begets suffering while going about the life I led. I can see it now. Acting on want feels gratifying and even transformative in the moment, so I still struggle to say and even struggle to believe that it’s not worth the toil and hurt and confusion it causes in the grand scheme. We’re living in a moment of constant upheaval, which can make it feel like there is no grand scheme, by which I don’t mean “divinely orchestrated destiny,” just: an understanding of life as something more expansive than “whatever sounds damn good right now.”
Which is not to knock the things that sound damn good right now! For example, I’m drinking exceptionally fragrant earl grey tea out of a lovely eggshell-blue ceramic cup and that’s fulfillment, not desire. I’ve been thinking about Want a lot in part because I’ve officially wrapped up my MFA application process, and I’ve never put myself in the position to want anything the way I want to get into my dream programs. I spent all day yesterday in the throes of research and Statements of Purpose, keeping my mind open enough that I initially didn’t rule out a program in Saskatchewan. There are two more programs I would have applied to if I hadn’t missed the deadlines, but neither are in places I especially want to live, so I’m not too downtrodden about that.
What I’m fighting now is anxiety, questions whose answers I cannot control, like:
1.) What if you don’t get in anywhere?
2.) What if you I get into a place where Ian would rather not live and he resents me for making him move there?
The first point is unfair to me, and the second is unfair to him. I have followed my partner to a ridiculous number of highly dubious places now. We lived in Ukiah because he got a job there, we lived in Placerville because he got a job there, and, on the not rural-Northern-California front, we lived in Boston because he got into grad school there. Seattle, the first city we ever moved to together, was a joint endeavor: he described it to me based on a visit from several years prior to our union and I said, “That sounds good.” In my early 20’s, I moved to Austin sight-unseen more or less to follow a girl, so signing a year lease when you arrive somewhere for the first time was not a crazy idea for me. About two years later, we moved to Boston, after which we unintentionally explored the far reaches of Northern California for what has now been a total of six years.
I am biologically unable to live anywhere for more than six years. The first time I did was my childhood in New Mexico, ages 2-12, but it didn’t happen again until I moved to Iowa City for my undergrad degree. My college career was six years and not four for two reasons: one was I spent a year as a part-time student so I could get resident tuition (the difference in cost was astronomical). The other was because at 22 I had my first all-out full-on true breakdown and withdrew from classes, putting me a semester behind. Quite necessarily, however. I left Iowa City on the heels of a low-key but truly emotionally fulfilling going-away party that took place at The Mill, our dearly departed folk music venue and bar that had also been the site of my 21st birthday party. Thanks to the dubious morals of a bartender not at The Mill who was tastelessly-but-kind-of-enticingly vocal about liking my tits, I’d been drinking in Iowa City for quite some time before that birthday. But I had to commemorate it anyway, because I’m from New Orleans, and I think passing up the chance to throw a party commemorating the night I can legally drink might have caused me to evaporate. Not worth the molecular risk.
Anyway. You’re all well aware by now that this Golden State and I have gone to the depths and shot to some highs, but I don’t know how often I talk about the highs. Here are a few:
1.) There is no more staggeringly beautiful place in America for hiking. The Pacific Northwest is a jewel, but California’s the crown.
2.) In my darkest hours, during our time in Mendocino County, we’d drive out to the ocean, and staring at the water convinced me I would be okay when I didn’t believe that at any other time. Which is to say, the Pacific and I are on excellent terms.
3.) Workout culture. If you’d told me when I was twenty-six that that would come to be a highlight of my life I would have slapped you. But now I would be calling you up and apologizing through grateful screams and gushing tears.
4.) Mexican food. Fuck, we couldn’t get any of it in Boston, not for real.
5.) In-and-Out. There. Are. No. Words.
6.) Municipal composting! The fact that this isn’t a given in America is a travesty. We also don’t have to sort our recycling and wow, the time it saves me when I can just toss my empty mineral-water bottles and sardine cans into one bin. (Rinsing everything out, obviously.)
7.) Flowers. California is spectacularly good at flowers.
8.) Bonfires on the beach. I don’t have any real desire to join a gathering myself, but watching them from a distance in Aptos is what I owe my entire novel-in-progress to. The way they look as twilight darkens, you can’t beat that for inspiration. I couldn’t, anyway.
9.) Coyotes. They keep their distance in New Mexico. They do not do that here.
10.) REASONABLY PRICED ORGASMICALLY FRESH AVOCADOS, obviously. Special shout-out to Fresh Market in Salinas who kept me cheaply and life-givingly supplied with these, and block after block of queso fresco, without which I could not have survived my most wrenching days as a substitute teacher. On a regular basis, I used to buy a block of queso fresco, slice it up like a loaf of bread, and eat it. Just eat it. All that richness gone in one sitting. I am grateful to say that I have not been compelled to eat an entire block of queso fresco in years.
Ten is enough to show love. Perhaps there’s more to come. There usually is, if you leave. The one place I didn’t have a sudden rush of love for before I left it was Boston. I was more than ready to leave Boston. I now look back on some of it with fondness, but not most of it. Its rigidity is not for me. (I was going to say “How my dad lived there I’ll never know,” but then I remembered that he dropped out of Berklee College of Music and showed up at my aunt’s door wild-eyed, having driven all night, so it’s safe to say that Boston’s rigidity was not for him either.)
Here’s to a year of loving where we’re at, feeling supported enough to be honest about not loving where we’re at, and having enough to love that’s not dependent on anything else that we can enjoy this whole Being Alive thing as luminously as possible for as long as we’ve got.