We did it! We made it to February.
If you’re anything like me, 2022 still seems like the correct year but 2021 feels like it never happened. After trying to place myself in our tricky time and space, I sometimes have to surrender to the eternal nature of all things. Letting emotions dance through me like heat rising from asphalt, an apparition curving the air.
I walked along the river with a friend today, we stopped to watch a heron standing stock still on a little island of scrub. These days I feel lucky to see water flowing along the slanted concrete walls, some years we can only get a little stream. We are all indebted to its presence, but I never really saw the river when I was a kid.
Living on the Westside I was very aware of the ocean’s horizon, I knew the streets with enough elevation to offer a glimpse of the silvery blue. My parents and I never left LA and my heart was tied to my city. When we finally visited Chicago to see my dad’s family, I was 11 or 12 and I got so homesick I almost threw up in a dance hall parking lot. It was some night where my cousin’s band played and a handful of family came to sway under red and purple neon. Surrounded by the presence of people who were familiar with each other and this place but not with me, I became overwhelmed with a far away feeling. I stumbled out into the cold night (warm by Chicago standards) and stared at my shoes. I felt as if my stomach was falling into a sinkhole expanding below my feet. My dad came outside, letting the twangy zing of electric guitars escape into the wide open night. Seeing his reliable shape brought me to tears. He held me to his chest until I managed to put to words a bit of my emotions.
I can’t see the ocean from here.
Now enough time has passed and I have seen countless suns fall past the horizon. I am endlessly grateful for my familiarity with a specific stretch of the Santa Monica Bay. Winter is secretly the best time for sunsets, because the cloudy patches add drama that cannot be mustered from a sunny blue sky. Summer beaches lure you in with the possibility of warm water, but it’s one of the rarest things. But if you brave the ice cold water, stay for the 8:00pm sunsets that paint the water pink.
Living in Atwater means the ocean is 12 miles away. There are days that I long for salt air. On those occasions I flip through apartments online and fantasize about a studio (with a parking space) that I can gradually fill with sand from my many beach days. I used to live in Venice, where the ocean was a 12 minute walk away. I’d go all the time, especially after my Eastside-based boyfriend and I were through. I doted on the beach like a lover, making daily voyages to run my fingers through the waves.
I still make it to the beach, but the voyage is more involved, crisscrossing the 5 to the 110 to the 10 freeway. It’s always worth it. I saw one of the best sunsets of my life a couple weeks ago. It was in between storms, the tide was low and slow. Driftwood was scattered across the sand, tiny bits of smooth wood that must have travelled miles from up north. The shore was so moist it mimicked the sky like an unbreakable mirror. Everything was grey-blue, purple, red and clear. In that moment I realized I want to be old by the ocean. One day, I want to die by the beach. It doesn’t have to be this same beach, but I hope I can feel the wet air on my soft cheeks, pink with the cold.
My great-grandmother grew up in Santa Monica, a lifelong California devotee. She died shortly after turning 100 and was cremated. At her request, my cousin got in a kayak and dumped her ashes three nautical miles from the shore. We stood on the pier and watched as a cloud of her grey dust surrounded his little yellow boat. We threw rose petals into the sea and some drunk mourner threw their champagne glass over the edge. It’s what she would have wanted! they cried defensively through sniffles.
Gloria was a tough woman but no one could deny the magnitude of her presence. She even died when she wanted to, having told her doctor she wanted to live until she finished her last art book. Perhaps part of my love for the ocean is finding her in its wild spirit, moving on its own terms.
The ocean was where I learned to surrender and how to roll with a wave. Fighting energy in motion can be subtle, we do it a little bit all the time. How long do we cling to our original vision until we allow the outcome that is truly meant for us? The fates will play back and forth with us forever, but the sea has no time for our concepts of where we should be. The tides are dancing with the moon.
I could pretend to be bigger than the forces of the cosmos, but I’d rather float. I want to flow as one. From that unity, I want to come home to the vastness.
That’s all for this week.
xx
James