I
Today’s my last day in California, and as if some kind of twisted joke, it is especially glorious, a day spent wrapped in the arms of comfort, my name light in the air as it leaves my parents’ tongues. The sun is high in the sky. Foolishly, I believe it’ll be there forever. It’s been almost 4 years since I’ve last come to this beach in particular. My teeth were so full of hope. My feet, deliciously cold in the way that comes only after tasting ocean. I spent an afternoon collecting shells and glass, remembering a book I read in elementary school about a girl on a coast far away, collecting sea glass in bottles lined on her windowsill. Ever since then, I’ve been compelled to search for them, to find the poetry in something tangibly human long since reclaimed by the force of nature, drawn to the earth beneath me, collecting glass before I began the full time practice of collecting memories.
It’s only upon leaving when I realize how deeply California runs in me, how my veins are filled with seawater, the desert sand baked into my skin. Only now, can I understand the pull this landscape has on me—like the moon pulls the tide at sea.
Tomorrow, I’ll be on the opposite coast, with a different sort of green. My skin will begin to pale again, exposed only to myself as I sleep.
II
The night before I leave, I watch the glow of the neighbor’s television echoing on the ceiling of my childhood. Just like that, I am sixteen again, watching its neurotic dance across my ceiling, flashing from red to blue to white, the star spangled colors of the all American cartoon lifestyle, feeling a deep itch somewhere in between my navel and my lowest left rib—an itch for something then, myopic I, could only describe as “other.” Now, the present is gilded with the glimmer that comes with memory, haunted by the knowledge that, three years later, I have seen the “other,” and it’s not that different at all. But I?
My thoughts are becoming cyclical, tied to the arrival of winter. This time last year, who was I? It all feels strangely familiar and yet far away, the ghostlike remnants of memory clinging to the shoulders of my dusty coat, rising through that pale darkness, eternal dusk—dawn.
III
My seasonal depression isn’t just a matter of daylight savings, though I could go on about light-becoming-dark, blue-grey shadows melding into dusky purple on classroom walls, the smell of a cold, wet sidewalk, the pale, ghost-like quality infused into everything. It’s also tied to my memories of last winter, of all encompassing darkness, the edges of my vision curling in on me like a burning sheet of paper, moments of pain so blinding and fresh that they would be followed by brilliant clarity, where, separated from my body, I would be able to take a detached wonderment at the full range of human experience. I was astonished at my ability to feel. To love and the physical pain that love caused when it broke. Not to say that this is something I desire to experience again (quite the opposite, I would not wish it upon anyone) but I find myself searching, submerged in an urban fog, for those moments of clarity again, and I wonder, as the years pass by, if I will continue to go back to those moments, if every coming winter will transport me back into my room, curled up on the mattress on the floor, watching the orange candlelight flicker, flickering, having never left after all.
IV
Donna Tartt speaks to an unreasonable heart, in the most literal sense, a heart unable to be reasoned with, a heart that can’t be trusted, a heart that beckons you closer to the flames of desire, singing softly, tenderly.
We don’t get to choose our hearts.
I was shocked into silence as I watched my tears unfurl into the porous paper, obscuring heart and flame.
V
Flying back to New York, five hours spent in a sort of strange, eerie twilight, keenly aware of people brushing past, of words being said, of the dryness of my own mouth, of tears slipping through my eyelashes despite a complete lack of emotion, of thoughts passing through my head like passengers happening to cross each other’s paths on their way to another, more pressing destination, this continuous hypnopompic state, where somehow, maybe, I thought—if I waited just long enough—I would wake up to you, smiling in your sleep on the other side.
The majority of my time feels like sand sifting through the hourglass at an alarming rate, rounded hills turning to peaks on the bottom, while the top begins to empty, filling with abstract space, like sand sifting through my fingers, sand turning to dust. My memories with you, amber-like in the living of them, joins the ranks of my memory no differently. From sand to dust. From dust to dust.
VI
The landing wakes me.
VII
The last time we were in California together, we were shedding our clothes in the center of a golden field.
I was laying in a particularly tall patch, the strands of grass wavering above my face, framing my vision so the sky appeared to be filtering through a halo of baby hairs. I couldn’t see you, but I could sense your presence near me, listening to the wind carry our breaths away. I have one hand on my stomach, one hand on my sternum — my bird bone as we call it — and I’m reminded of my fragility.
My bones protrude. Anyone can see them. Even you can see them.
VIII
Sonder: the realization that other people lead lives as rich and 3-dimensional as your own.
You’re standing by the window of a subway car, watching a station pass, submerged in a greenish-yellow glow, an eternal space blocked off from the rest of space-time, people waiting, murmuring, already on their way to their final destinations. Another train passes, momentarily running on parallel tracks, and you can look into the next window, where eerily, almost always, there is a single person, leaning against a pole, reading, or talking to another person slightly out of sight, the edges of your frame flickering like candlelit shadows, the sway of both cars barely out of sync with each other, a glimpse into a parallel universe where you no longer contain space, you are a photon, pure light, and this moment lasts forever and all of 10 seconds before the train splits away onto another track and you’re left blinking at your own reflection, settling back into your body, already moving on to thoughts of your next destination.
IX
There’s a passage in Junichiro Tanazaki’s In Praise of Shadows that talks about letting the sad, fragile, dying rays of light sink into absolute repose.
In the third grade, I was shown a documentary on glass blowing. I watched, rapt, as hot liquid sand was transformed into beguiling, fantastical shapes and colors. That day, when I went home, I watched the light play through the bottles of sea glass lined on the edge of my desk, the colorful shadows shifting as the light waned outside my window.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I’ve come back to New York and of the eternal ephemerality of light—despite its inevitable return, it retains that particular heart wrenching quality that comes with loss.
I’ve been thinking about sending that passage to you with the note, “To love is to live in eternal dusk.”
X
I love you in a way that renders words insufficient.
But if I were to attempt to describe the feeling, just once, I would say, “I see you in the fronds of trees wavering above my head, in the moon and its delightful fullness, in each grain of the desert sand, glimmering, golden, strands of grass framing the sheer blue sheet of sky, if I look close enough, I can see you through it. Does that make sense?
Your presence imbued into the light on my pillow at 8:40 AM on an early Friday morning. Just knowing that, somewhere, you are asleep and I am awake, that for a moment on this timeline — for nothing more than a blip—we occupy the same space-time and the possibilities of that are so small that they’re infinite, eeries me.”
but if I were to put it simply, it would be this:
I love you strongly,
softly,
Claire
XI
Everything I love is made of glass, and glass is still sand.