The Collector
A new city is not the landscape for my existential matters. Once I consistently know which direction is west, when highway exits are more than me yelling, “Which lane?!” at my GPS, and the gang member dog at my new house turns over the piece of my back leg he bit off my first morning, only then can my potential soul resurface with its disconcerting queries. (Was the raven on the awning watching over us or was it a warning?) In defense of the pup, he was marketed in TJ as a chihuahua and ended up being a midsized alpha, and second, he’s bitten everyone in the family once. To make peace, I consider myself to have been jumped into the home. So, until these come to pass, I have to let the sun set the way it wants to: slow fire over lilac waves rolling over January toes, and a withholder of why San Diego has come up short. I’m not supposed to look at it, and as I blink away the dots across Del Mar’s horizon, I think that if it weren’t for my audio engineering school and a funny, jaded lawyer I’ve befriended, I’d have moved to the wrong place.
Almost everywhere I’ve tried to make this move work, someone has tossed me their earthquake. The more this happens, the more I wonder if common-decency seismographs weren’t installed under this county of highways. I moved four times in two months. But maybe because the cost of living is at ungovernable heights, it’s an acceptable endeavor to lie, scam, harass, and/or avoid a newbie in town. Or maybe it’s just because the Pacific Ocean stays cold. Either way, I’ve had to start collecting wins to get myself to stay here:
My plate from Madrid busted on the driveway as I unloaded the car my first night in California. (Was that an omen?) But I’ve also wanted to make a little mosaic coffee table and now I have more pieces. The scam gifted me a friend from Mexico City and the first traveler’s palm I’d seen. One of its massive leaves dominated my bedroom window on the second floor, scraping the screen during rare rains and procuring my mystery raven. I found my adventure cat a vet in TJ despite the three-hour pedestrian line we surmounted to cross back over the Mexico/U.S. border. I can’t find single slices of vegan pizza in San Diego, but there’s a streetside café next to Little Italy with chocolate almond croissants that stay warm in the case under morning sun. The first time I parallel parked downtown, the electrical box behind me dented my bumper, but I also finally accepted that I can’t parallel park.
I collect solo-sojourned events, too. My favorite so far is Chula Vista’s devastatingly beautiful Day of the Dead. At one of the ofrendas, a Mexican woman was gifting small oranges from a basket she held. I accepted one and asked her in Spanish, “Is it okay that I’m crying?” I had just come from an altar dedicated to women who had crossed to the other side too young. I’d been holding back tears for over an hour, and then I was asked if I wanted to write the name of a woman I knew who had departed. My friend had been missing in Montana for eight months and her body had just been found. As I tied my prayer to her on one of the little tree limbs next to the other messages, the bound well inside of me broke. “Isn’t this supposed to be a happy time?” I asked the woman with the oranges. “Sí,” she answered. “We celebrate the lives of the people we love. But it’s also sad because we miss them.”
I thought I wouldn’t miss Montana. In the summers, I used to say, “If one more person asks me to go on a day hike, I swear I’ll throw myself off the top of the mountain.” In the winters, “If one more friend just wants to meet for hot tea at their house…” Now, I’d do anything to be bored and cold and with the people I love. But I’ve hopped on a city train for the first time in 11 years and took it to a new library. I know that if I don’t push through the loss of my previous life, I’ll always wonder if the one I’d been yearning for there was on the other side of whatever the hell’s going on here. I’d wonder how the collection would be coming along.
Are everyone’s ancestors hanging out in this café with us? my potential soul inquires over the hot chai we’re sharing. I stopped in Encinitas on the way home to shake off the evening fog that penetrated our coats. “No questions!” I reprimand. “We have to go find the highway.”
Photos below: Del Mar, Audio School, Traveler’s Palm, Pedestrian Border Line in TJ, Mexico
