Sunburnt Grass
Highways are blue. Don’t you agree? The highway is a dusky blue, and the split of the lanes is an offensive white that spits in your eye if you glance its way, and the sky is hot orange and the world is coughing its way to the finish line as you eat up mile after mile in Southern California. You’re 21 and you’ve been listening to too much Phoebe Bridgers.
You have a California personality, and a New York Tempermant, and a Southern heart. An aspiring model said that about you when you were 19 and it’s sat on the soft bit between your collarbones like a necklace ever since.
A California Personality.
You read too much Joan Didion and dream of a life as an essayist and screenwriter. You relish a kiss of sun on your shoulders, and the brief window of time in the heat of summer where your freckles are browned and your hair flaming red.
You smoke a joint sitting on the cool bathroom tile while sharing stories before standing chest to chest in the shower giggling as you oscillate between cold air and hot water.
You’re self-important and self-obsessed. You spend too much of your time in traffic, straining to look through tinted bullet-proof glass. Who could that somebody be? You wanted to be a somebody. You think you’ve seen it all when you’ve only seen Hollywood.
You keep mistaking the streetlight by your house for the full moon.
There’s a poem in that, but you can’t be bothered to write it.
You’re a little lonely all the time, but you’re warm–so you don’t mind.
You hike through Griffith Park and stop every ten steps for a dry breath. You’re used to comfortable southern humidity, water imbued in the air. The air makes your nose bleed, and the people you pass make your stomach suck up into itself, but whose fault is that really besides your own?
A runner sprints up and down the steep path, 3 times before you even reach the scenic view. On their last time, he glances down to your slouched figure, as you perch on a boulder. He’s wearing an oxygen mask, which muffles his voice.
“Where are you from?” He assumes.
“Not from here–” you reply between pants.
“You and everybody else.” He gives you a fist bump before skipping down, rock after rock down the trail.
Reality TV stars, and friends with the next Oscar-worthy script, and Charles Manson look-a-like rock bands, and the runner in the oxygen mask, and You.
It’s a familiar isolation, a comfortable exclusion. You’re 21.
A New York Tempermant.
You’re on the overground M train, with your brother. You’ve lived here for nearly a year, but it’s your first time on the M line. He’s in a rush, and you’re lost for words. Night covers the city, matching the East River’s obsidian hue. As the train bumps over the slotted rails, you turn to him– “Do you get used to it?”
He doesn’t look up from his phone. “The skyline? No. One good thing.”
He slides the phone into his pockets, crossing his arms over his chest. You both stare at the unblinking lights.
You read/watch too much Nora Ephron and dream of life as a FUNNY essayist/screenwriter while hoping desperately for an idyllic apartment on the Upper West Side.
You sit in coffee shops, writing on the sticky keyboard of your college laptop, and drinking from oversized lattes.
You cherish your mother’s hand-me-down jewelry, knowing you will have no designer watches to pass down to your own children. You wish you were a Parker Posey career woman, but know you’re more of a bookshop girl. But you don’t work in a bookshop, you’re just in them all the goddamn time spending money you don’t have.
You spend weekday afternoons walking through tree-lined avenues passing by strollers, and dogs, and lives that’ll never be your own, but you somehow long for.
In crowded bar nights, you meet people just like you, with fears and aspirations just like your own, and you rejoice in the company but fear their competition.
You leave the thrumming sounds, and claustrophobic heat of the bar, for the pounding of your headphones and cool commute of your 15-minute walk home.
But you find yourself running home, past nightclubs, and sports bars where people will meet and either inexplicably fall in love or never see each other again. You can’t pass a block that isn’t crowded with stories, and past-life connections.
You slow to a walk, your chest pounding, and your eyes teary.
Stop looking to the sky, the luxury lofts don’t have your answer. Look to the pavement, age-old gum, and attempts at semi-poetic, Instagrammable street graffiti.
The M train is now your train home.
You’re desperate for a story and you never get used to it. You’re 23.
A Southern Heart.
Virginia is breaking cold in the winter and suffocatingly hot in the summer.
You leap into bed at night, afraid of monsters nipping at your heels, and you lay like a vampire in your bed. Arms crossed chest, if they think you’re already dead, they won’t try to kill you.
You dance through the day with a self-assured confidence, and bruised shins.
You find crumpled-up beer cans in the ravine and have your first kiss in a thicket of brush with a sweet boy who says, “You don’t really have to–” before you grab his cheeks, and plant one square into his front teeth.
On the safe carpets of your bedroom, staring at the stars glued to your ceiling, you’re convinced you’ve seen it all. You know how most things feel–like a snake bite would feel like a really sharp bee sting, an orgasm will feel like a sneeze (that’s what the Cosmo you swiped from the 7/11 said at least,) and one day you won’t fear the dark.
You’ll move to a city, where you’re somebody that everybody knows. A city where the lights are always on.
In your hometown, everybody knows you as a soon-to-be-somebody. At least that’s what your Mother’s friends like to say. You choose to believe them.
In your hometown, your curfew is “when the streetlights turn on.”
Streetlights on, competing with the moon’s natural glow. Artificial competition.
You don’t need to worry about writing that poem for now.
For now, you can eat sandwiches in the back of a parked pickup truck, and ride your bike up the big hill, and afternoon fall asleep on your friend’s couch before politely declining an invitation to stay for dinner.
You hop fences and get into safe trouble. You’re 11.
You have a California personality, and a New York Tempermant, and a Southern heart.
You’re apathetic, impatient, and overly nostalgic.
You’re hopeful, ambitious, and home.
It is so easy to look back with regret. Questioning decisions that’ve already been made. Missing people who’ve already been lost. Aching for versions of yourself that don’t exist.
When agonizing, I think of an escape route. Of riding the E to JFK. Eating up miles and miles under my feet. Riding my bike up the big hill to somewhere I’ve never been before.
Plunging into the unknown, uprooting my life for a bolder, better one.
So now, in doubt, I contemplate the grass that might be greener. Even if the grass is burnt by the sun, and artificially green. Even if the streetlight looks just like the moon.
Who else could I be? Other than a version of me, isolated, hopeful, but safe?
Who else could I be? Other than the versions of me that already existed.
Who else could I be?
Highways are blue. Don’t you agree? Where will this blue take you?
