Goodbye to the Golden State
Dear California,
I forgot to tell you yesterday that goodbye does not come easily to me anymore. I used to believe every goodbye was a question mark — I was fooled by the belief that our youth would make us immune to life’s changing tides. But I’ve now spent enough time watching the days move on their usual way that I understand this is a terrible lie.
California, I chose you because you were the furthest place on the map from my childhood. I hoped somewhere along your expansive coast, among your jutting bluffs and swooping mountains, I could find refuge. I explored missions and mountains, each trip up your coast a chance at renewal. With you, the world looked new again. Your redwoods rose ever higher into the sky while the magnolia trees and honeysuckles of my youth shed themselves each season. I put my faith in you, believing that before the edge of the continent I would find a place to call home.
And I’ll admit, when we were good, it was golden. There were sprawling Santa Barbara days spent wandering to the bluffs with blankets and wine, emptying bottle after bottle and then throwing them out to sea. Like me, I had no idea how far away from home they would end up. There were summers when everything was gold and the air tasted like salt and when I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize myself anymore. Back then, the ocean breeze clung to my skin, stinking of seaweed, and I believed the scent would never leave.
Get Aimee Millwood’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I was content with you California, even when I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I used to spend hours at our favorite spot on beach, where the sperm whales would gather in gargantuan, lazy pods during mating season. They were sedentary, content, ignorant of the waves crashing around them and the pulls of life and breath and family. They remained satisfied to return to this home, season after season and year after year, with no itch to vary the plan. I came and watched and craved more than anything to be like them — complacently settled.
But then came the year I discovered that soon everything would fade, that the present moment was already becoming another memory, that time was slipping from our grasp as the world narrowed. I understood, that year, that our lives were lengthening and shortening in unison, and I questioned how to measure growth.
At first, I tried to escape it, racing time zones and country borders feverishly, believing that only through motion would I progress. I thought if I collected enough people and places, drowned myself in new languages, new cultures, I could escape the inevitable plodding progress of life. What began as running towards a destination soon became endless, meaningless motion. I understand now that transience itself reaches a standstill — there comes a time when you become tired — of day-old friends, of packing and unpacking, of long nights on busses only to wake up bleary eyed in cities and countries that soon all began to look the same. Because no country looks like the one you claim as your own.
Now California, each time I return to you I am confronted with the knowledge that we are — despite my best attempts to thwart it — changing. We’re getting older. My friends have dispersed across you to create lives that are so different than the ones we once shared that I can barely grasp on to the threads that once held us together.
It all seems so far away now, really, as I visit the old people, the old places. I catch wisps that bring me back — street signs and stale liquor breath and the sweet stench of bonfire caught in unwashed hair. But now, everything that once passed without notice are suddenly enveloped with emotion — it seems every corner of you has accumulated a part of me. Ghosts of old lovers wander up the streets of San Francisco, and no matter where I go, Isla Vista will forever carry the sound of the waves to my window.
Yesterday in the airport parking lot, as the minutes ticked closer to my flight and I drank in the last moments of your weightless air, all I could see looming over your horizon was the knowledge that I could no longer pretend we would be able to outrun the ebb and flow of life. I’ve learned now that every place you leave takes a part of you with it, but I’m growing to accept the next time we meet nothing will be the same, and maybe that’s ok.
