The gym I’m entitled to work out in for free is a palace: incomparably more up-to-date than the gym I was paying far, far too much to train in back in SF. But I could walk there. I can’t walk to this one, and that’s obnoxious — the gym, ideally, is a place you get to all on your own, whenever you want. I miss walking to the gym, although I don’t miss the gym being the only place I want to walk to becuase I can’t stand anyone or anything, which is how SF made me feel. I walked around with my trusted headphones because, in my anxious state, the inanity of people’s conversations often got to me. Here? Everyone’s a character out of a Southern Gothic novel and dialogue is a gift, even if I can’t always decipher country accents that were not, despite my roots, part of my upbringing.
I miss mandated recycling. It’s not a thing here and we just found out that giant green bins are just trash bins because no one cares about that. Which sucks more than ever because, as I’m sure you’re painfully aware, the planet is burning itself alive. Because of us. Not caring. For too long.
I miss my personal trainer even though the possibility of us working together remotely has been proposed. I work out because it feels great but when it comes to challenging myself I can’t deny that there’s nothing like genuinely impressing someone who Knows Their Shit while you’re doing it.
I miss Spanish being an everyday language so that I don’t suddenly find myself welling up with emotion when I hear it in an IKEA elevator in Atlanta.
I don’t actively miss the ocean because it’s a dominant aspect of my creative consiousness. I truly cannot stop writing about the Pacific and I’m just letting that be for as long as it goes.
I miss Ian not getting fucking hostile looks from white redneck dudes for the way he dresses or who knows what. This does not, mercifully, happen very often. But there are a few spots here that welcome racists, and you can feel that thick in the air when you walk in. One of them was successfully shut down when a student protest led to the owner of a bar being convicted of dodging taxes since time immomorial. So most people in this town are truly good. But that makes the hateful ones stand out to a degree that I have never experienced.
I don’t miss the subdued white people of San Francisco, who were a whole other breed of hostile as far as being me was concerned.
I don’t miss having to disclaim every expression that isn’t YOU ARE PERFECT before I even express it, lest I’m written off as an unhinged ball of rage.
So mostly I don’t miss, but what my sleep-deprived menstuation-addled state is perhaps not getting across this very minute is that what I do miss, I miss powerfully. And it doesn’t help when I walk into the gym and a Red Hot Chili Peppers song is playing, two different anthems on two different occassions, and then the third time I go, Katy Perry’s “California Girls” is playing. Someone is obviously fucking with me.
You know what I really don’t miss? Paying twice the rent we’re paying on our 3-bedroom/2-bathroom house for a one-fucking-bedroom apartment. Having my own bathroom and my own office turns out to have been a need, but saying that even to myself once sounded unforgivably entitled to me. I’ve forgive myself since.
I don’t have a powerful ending. I’ve just missed telling you all what’s up.