Hey

This solstice, I wanted a photograph I didn’t take, of the full moon from last summer’s solstice. Driving home on one of the final nights of my MFA program’s residency, I saw the moon from the window of my car with a tree branch silhouetted against it. I took out my phone to capture it, but I was driving. It wasn’t safe. I put my phone away. The perfect angle on the moon and its branch disappeared from my window.

This year, the June full moon was ten days before the solstice. They were no longer aligned.

On Father’s Day we went to the beach for the first time since the fires. When the Palisades were burning I kept thinking about the beach, about the animals that live in the water and on the shore, about everything in the houses and cars that burned that then flowed into the ocean. It seemed to me that it might never be safe to go swimming again.

My home was not directly threatened by the fires. We were three blocks south of the southern boundary of the evacuation zone for the Sunset Fire, which was quickly put out after we fled the city for what turned out to be six weeks. And yet it is hard to describe the degree of terror I felt about the idea of returning to Los Angeles, the sense that I had that it was environmentally destroyed, perhaps irremediably. This feeling had its roots in Jane Williams’s now-infamous contributions to the January 15 Clean Air Coalition Zoom, and also just plain common sense. How could the fires not leave a permanent toxicity in their wake?

Maybe, probably, they did. But I went swimming twice that week in June. I felt the measure of my body against the bigness of the ocean; I was comforted to be in it. I felt my smallness against the question of whether it was safe. The way I could not answer that.

Late one night at the end of March, with a naughty feeling of playing hooky, I drove from downtown L.A. to Malibu. I had been at work until nine o’clock that night, running an event, and I had tickets to a concert I’d bought before realizing I had to work that night, and I had a feeling—a hope—that I could catch the last few songs. This unlikely idea would require a round trip drive of over two hours late in the evening and inspired me to keep the tickets instead of sell them.

Really what I wanted was the drive. It frightened and enthralled me. I had a hard time learning to drive. I failed driver’s ed, had to take private lessons, my parents resisted taking me out for practice because they were both nervous drivers and I wasn’t exactly a good driver, and then three weeks after I finally got my license, I had a head-on collision with a octogenarian veteran-turned-retired-school-librarian driving the Cadillac he’d bought with his pension. He was doing sixty in a school zone, but I shouldn’t have pulled out in front of him.

After that, I didn’t drive regularly until I moved to L.A. at age twenty-five. In all that time—during which I mostly lived in New York, and only sat behind the wheel of a car when I came home to visit—it seemed impossible to me that I would one day be able to fly into a city I had never visited, rent a car, and drive myself around. Today I’ve done this many times over, and I appreciate it as a small compensatory miracle.

PCH was still closed in March, had flooded since the fires, would flood again. Instead of out to Santa Monica on the 10, Google Maps took me up into the Valley on 101, through the nighttime kingdom of broader L.A., its lights and closed houses, its strip malls, sushi restaurants, fenced fields, dark-fronted bars. Out Las Virgenes Canyon Road, passing the spot where three years ago our doula took portraits of my husband and I in the last month of my pregnancy. I road the curving road, not knowing if I’d be allowed on PCH when I reached the ocean, and that was OK. If I had to turn right back around, it would have been worth it.

I drove right out to the coast. No one stopped me. I must have passed through the burn scar, but It was night and I couldn’t see it. What would I have seen if the sun had been up?

I made it to the concert to hear the last three songs. When I got home, my partner was still awake, watching basketball on the couch.

Lately I’ve been looking around my apartment with a kind of wonder. It is amazing that I have this space, that it is mine, that my family lives here. Although it sometimes seems that all my partner and I do is organize and reorganize and sort and deal with the stuff in this apartment, our space is largely harmonious. The apartment works, it functions as a home. It’s strange to remember now that when I was pregnant I felt truly concerned about not having a house with a yard to bring my baby home to, about my lack of a large nursery to paint and decorate, my failure to be a homeowner. All of those anxieties now seem like the gentle fears of a child who wants to be like the others, who does not yet understand that they are different, that everyone is different. I have a place to live in a city I adore. I feel lucky to be here.

Yesterday we rolled up all the rugs and covered all the cloth furniture with beach towels to potty train our son. Right before his nap this afternoon, he peed in the potty for the first time.

I love this home. I wonder about leaving it. I worry about having to leave it—and what does having to leave mean? Sometimes I am imagining a hard, painful choice, and sometimes I am imagining no choice at all. Last night, lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, I had an anxious fantasy of being taken from our home, led into a bus outside.

(Writing this, I paused and scrolled through hundreds of posts, trying to find the video I saw in which ICE came for a man after his immigration hearing and his wife told them: “If you’re taking him, we’re all going. We are a family,” as their small children watched, holding her hands. But I couldn’t find that video. I did read many other stories for the first time, such as that of Ward Sakeik, a stateless Palestinian woman who has lived in the United States since she was eight years old, and who was detained, “handcuffed for 16 hours, moved like cattle and not provided food or water,”and held for 140 days after attempting to reenter the mainland United States after spending her honeymoon in the U.S. Virgin Islands.)

It wasn’t a nightmare. I wasn’t asleep.

I tell myself that the feelings I am experiencing are an expression of my empathy. That I am internalizing the wild violence being done to my neighbors, perpetrated all around me, seeping into the morphic field. And that’s probably true. It’s also true that in a very short period of time I have come to feel much more frightened about leaving my home, about potentially traveling, having to move through an airport, through customs.

At present, this feeling is somewhat adaptive: we won’t leave our house until we take our son to school on Monday—that’s how you do it, you keep the kid naked all weekend to create an environment of heightened, routine-aided interoception, and if we had outdoor space, that would be nice for the potty training, but we do not—and I’m glad, even though it is a grind, and the days are hot, and our apartment loaded with stuff and living like this requires a constant churn of cooking and doing dishes and laundry and devising entertainments for the child. I’m grateful for the space and relative security and safety I have.

Yesterday (day 1 of potty training) I felt such a terrible weight when I learned that that bill had passed. I have nothing special to say about it, just sorrow. For so much of my life I’ve said things like, “I have depression and anxiety but I’ve always managed well with therapy.” I’m curious about what the ideas of “depression” and “anxiety” mean now, as the experience of both feels profoundly rational. I’m curious what “managing well” would mean here. But then I suppose it’s been that way a long while. Forever, perhaps. And I am just feeling it in a new way now.

This morning the first record I played was Carrie and Lowell. Then my partner, who had just finished reading Monument Eternal, put on The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. Then I put on Born In The U.S.A. 

“I’m not feeling patriotic,” my partner said.

“Me neither,” I told him, "this song is not patriotic. Springsteen only performs it live in Europe, not in the U.S., because he doesn’t want the meaning to get twisted…” I said, repeating a half-remembered piece of fan trivia my dad shared with me when he took me to see Bruce in San Diego last year. Seeing the Boss with my dad, who has seen Springsteen live over fifteen times, was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I wasn’t prepared for how intense the concert would be, how it seemed that tens of thousands of people had gathered for a grief-focused prayer service. I wasn’t prepared for the sound of them all singing together.

The song that brought me to tears was “No Surrender.” So wholly did it bring back to me that world of my childhood, our summers together, the mutual endeavor, the warm wet heat, the smell of fresh cut grass, the evenings when the CD player like a small silver spaceship played out its lonely tunes into my bedroom. Once, we had all been there together. We made a promise we swore we’d always remember…

Our son freestyled a very cute little dance to “Glory Days", but I didn’t much feel the old movement of the music. The way it seemed to belong to my happiness, the way our lakehouse with the speedboat stereo blasting “Livin’ On A Prayer” was my happiness’s native home. Or rather, that I felt it was my father’s happiness’s native home, and that realm was homeland to me.

Ultimately, none of it belonged to me. I have only what I can hold, and maybe not that either. Maybe I can’t hold so many things, see that far ahead of me.

I wave to my neighbor in the street. I make a French lentil salad with feta for lunch, dreaming of travel, even if I am afraid to move. I sit to write the words I remember, the ones that have gathered in my mind like mercury, coagulated there, waiting impatiently to be let out into the world.

Postscript: this week I had a song stuck in my head, and I couldn’t figure out what it was, until I did: “SexyBack,” but very specifically the supercut of Troll 2 set to “SexyBack,” which is the reason I even know that song, a special piece of early 2000s internet ephemera. Nothing but respect for MY president! I’d like to see AI try to make anything as brilliant as this masterful early-2000s mashup, which unfortunately you have to be logged in to YouTube to watch for “age verification reasons.” Well, that’s some bullshit. Which could be said for so many things, including and especially AI.

HUMANITY FOREVER

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.