2. Goodbye, CA

New ID, New Me

My mom lent me her Honda CRV for a day trip along my favorite coastal route north of the city. It was January 3. I was too warm in my thin sweater. And, I spent the drive listening to Joni Mitchell and other nostalgic songs about the holy land of California. A fire that foreshadowed what was to come had scorched the mountainous shoulder of the PCH. So, I kept my gaze cast over the water, opposite, and on the road ahead of me. The cousins and family friends I visited there asked if my mom would ever leave LA, like they had, or if I would ever return. It was easy to tell them, someday, when there were no deadlines, only home.

Harder to answer were those same questions posed in reverse, by acquaintances at parties, and on first dates. Some asked to gauge the return on their investment in a deepening relationship. Others asked as part of a demographic survey on Brooklyn transplants as a whole. The answers I gave back varied based on how interested I was in them, not because of any real clarity.

Being a Californian, not in California, is much like being a writer who’s not writing. As long as you can convince others, or yourself, that one day you will be, then you get to keep the card.

***

Since the fire, I’ve been unable to convince myself of anything. I can’t justify not being there. And, a hairball of guilt, lodged somewhere in my throat, keeps me from being totally here. I only wanted to put enough distance between myself and my childhood that it would feel like I’d grown. Now, I’ve created a life somewhere else entirely, that I can’t walk back from.

Before I moved away for college, my mom told me that, once I left, I would learn what it really meant to be from Los Angeles. And she was right. I never feel more a part of it than when I’m away from it. I’ve been filled with a posthumous sense of pride for a place where I had once felt like an overly watered potted plant.

Even though I’d left the nest, I hadn’t really let myself experience what it felt like to be gone. There was a part of me that still needed to know I could go back to where my growth edge had already been sanded down, to be brave enough not to.

***

The process of rebuilding the neighborhood is already beginning, even before the land has been cleared. As I made plans to return to LA for my mom’s birthday, she asked if I wanted to see what was still there, rotting. I said I didn’t know.

I had a dream of myself that night, dressed in a hazmat suit, staring at the rubble of our lives. I sat in the one wooden chair left in the oasis of our front yard, which had remained miraculously untouched by the flames. And I found it a funny metaphor for the life I had left there. From where I stood in the shining memory of what had once been, my life was just as intact as ever. But, the reality, just beyond the barrier of what I let myself see, were the charred remains.

There were salvageable parts, but nothing that I could walk back into without major reconstruction. All the dreams and illusions that I could be in two places at once were gone. I could start over there again, or I could continue the work where I was, but not both.

***

So, I let California go, or rather I surrendered it. I walked into the DMV at 9 am last Monday morning, slid my driver’s license with the little brown bear in the corner and some documents proving my residency under a pane of glass. A part of me hoped that what I provided wouldn’t be sufficient. But, instead, they complimented me on how prepared I was, and sent me away with a flimsy and temporary demonstration of being a New Yorker.

The woman at desk 42 told me that it would take three weeks for my new ID to arrive in the mail, but I still check for it every afternoon. If it would just come, then I wouldn’t have to be in this in between anymore. I wouldn’t feel so obviously apart from everyone. I could just be like everyone else who was finally facing the paperwork that comes after they’d made a life altering decision.

Sophie, Age 16, Holding Her First Temporary License