Playing Pretend.
I drive to work on Livingston Avenue, the humidity decorating my windshield with a sticky glaze. I am taking the usual route, past the cow fields, the new up-and-coming suburban sprawls, and the swampy, goopy forests. It is a route that I can drive in my sleep: predictable, easy, and every bit as mundane as where I live. I put my left turn signal on as I approach a four way stoplight. No one is stopped here besides me and I feel isolated and alone in the sweaty Florida dawn. The light turns green.
When I turn left, something changes. I am suddenly no longer near the swamps and cow fields; I am driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. The jade blue waters of the Pacific crest and curl to my right as I drive south. The sun rises over the palm trees and hills to my left, spilling its beautiful colors over the Pacific. I roll down my window and smell the Pacific salt and hear its waves churn and crash. Cars whisk by me, but I hardly notice them; I am spellbound by the ocean—my ocean.
It is only when I blink I return to the bleak normalcy of Lutz, Florida. I want my beaches, my ocean, and my California, but I am stuck here, biding my time. I press hard down on the gas and blow through another red light. I keep telling myself soon, soon, it’ll be here soon. But it will never be soon enough, not when my heart is in the Golden State, 2,332 miles away from this place.
US Open.
My obsession with California started sometime in 2014. My mom suddenly announced that we were going to vacation there to see the U.S. Open of Surfing, as per my brother’s request. I had never thought of California, never dreamed of California, and never really knew about California before this date, but something about this trip made me more excited than I could understand. I remember doing yard work the week before and imagining myself there as dirt caked my hands. My brother made fun of me for working so slowly, but I wasn’t even present, I was imagining this place, this dream: California.
It was so surreal to be in California, in this place that I didn’t know or have an intimate connection to, but I felt so at home in. I remember running through Huntington Beach with my parents and feeling a new energy, something that I had never really felt before. Normally, running wore me out, but running through the quiet neighborhoods of Surf City in the nine-o-clock breeze made me feel like I could keep running and running and running until I reached the gem-like waters of the Pacific.
After doing mostly surfing-related activities at the request of my brother, my parents finally asked me where I wanted to go. I had been silent most of the trip, just taking everything in. I watched as we drove down the 5, past more cars than I had ever seen in my life. I watched as we walked on Newport in the heat of the golden sun. I watched as we drove down the Pacific Coast highway, the ocean putting on a show for us as we drove south. I was done watching, so I suddenly blurted out a place.
“Laguna Beach.”
My parents asked me why and I told them the generic, common things. I told them it was pretty and the sunsets were gorgeous. I told them that it would be fun to drive up the PCH to get there. The final nail in the coffin on my operation is that I told my mom that I thought Hollister originated there. She thought it would be cool to see the actual first location, so we went. In reality, I had no idea where the first Hollister even was, but something seemed to be pulling me to this place, I just wouldn’t know for three more years.
In the time since I’d left California, I went through high school graduation, depression, caffeine addiction, toxic relationships, and really stupid spending habits. During all of these ups and downs, California was not always immediately on my mind, but it was still lingering in my unconscious.
I would think about it often: the churning waves, breeze, and fan palms. I imagined being there again and again, but it got harder and harder to visualize the more real Florida became in my life. I thought California was an elusive and mythical place, much like the imaginary island that it gained its namesake from. California could have very well been a fairy tale backdrop, because once upon a time I was there, and now that memory was growing hazy.
Recollection.
In 2017, it finally happened. I remembered why I needed to be there. I was sprawled out on my bed. I snuggled up under the blankets and started watching a video for no reason whatsoever: “Los Angeles Freeway in the 1960s.” I saw the cars, the freeway, the people, and it started rushing back to me like the waves in the Pacific. I wanted to go there and I knew I had to be there. I just had no idea how to get there. After that moment, I bore witness to other archival California videos and documentaries. I started learning about my state, what it was, what it stood for, and why I kept coming back to it.
Later that year, I got to go back. I would have never dreamed that I would get to revisit my favorite place in the way that I did. My boyfriend, who I had dated online for seven months, lived in Southern California and he knew how much I loved it. Our first meeting was at LAX, at the baggage claim and when we saw one another, we ran and hugged and toppled to the floor at the sheer force of that hug. We were laughing there, on the Dalmatian-spotted floor, travelers stepping around us and over us, and we very well could have been the only two people in California at that moment.
He took me back to Laguna Beach on that trip and we had a panini and an iced green tea latte on the sand. Seagulls sat beside us, begging for a scrap of our holiday meal, but we didn’t care. We were laughing and in one another’s arms on Laguna Beach. We were together, and it was on that trip that I discovered that it was with him I really wanted to be. We let the Pacific spray us as we named our new seagull friends and walked up and down the nearly-empty beach in scarves we had gifted each other.
It seems funny to me that some unknown, otherworldly force was pulling me to California all those years ago, only for me to meet my boyfriend there. Now, almost two years since I first met him at LAX, I am about to move there and begin my life as a California resident. I am planning on getting engaged with him shortly after I arrive. I haven’t told anyone this yet, but I know in my heart that it is the right thing to do. We might be physically far apart from one another, but in the one month we have spent together physically in 2017 and 2018, I have seen just how intensely and deeply he loves me.
He is helping me on the 36-hour drive because he wants to be a part of my California dreams, which people in my more immediately life do not support whatsoever. I love him and I love California and I am so excited for this new chapter in my life that will combine those two loves, instead of making them exist separately.
I am ready to turn away from the cow fields and take a left on the Pacific Coast Highway, me in the driver’s seat and him in the passenger’s. I want to pull the top down on my car and feel the Pacific and take in its sheer size. I want to reach over the gear-shift and feel his warm hand there, draped in the early morning California sun. I’m ready to stop being obsessed and start living.
Comments