Homesickness

With only a few days before I left New York to celebrate Christmas in California, homesickness hit me quite suddenly. It's a disconcerting feeling, and I can’t exactly explain where I’m homesick for: I haven’t lived with my family in the Bay Area since I graduated high school, and, despite living in Los Angeles for the last five years, I never really considered it “home”.

I have an odd connection with the places I’ve lived. In high school, I wanted nothing more than to move as far away from the Bay Area as I could after I graduated. I couldn't really think of a reason why, except that I wanted something new, something exciting. And, in a stroke of self-delusion that even Bill O'Reilly would envy, I convinced myself of something that I knew to be very much untrue: that I disliked the Bay Area. So for college, I settled on Los Angeles as being a sufficient distance from home.

Now, my relationship with Los Angeles was rocky from the beginning. I disliked nearly everything about it. I disliked its flatness, its sprawl, the traffic, the architecture, the constricting feeling outside when the clouds rolled in, and I especially didn’t like how the city ground to a halt when it started to rain. If god is in the rain, then he is an angry, vengeful god when it comes time to hydrate the City of Angels.

Oddly, all these same things suddenly became charming, almost quaint, about the Bay Area. I always loved walking through my hometown on an overcast or drizzly day. The hills are greener, the trees are darker, the world seemingly more finite and more contained. And though I grew up in suburbia, the sprawl here seemed more controlled, punctuated, as it was, by large swaths of calming open space.

Who wouldn't want to live in a place where something like this

isn't more than 10 minutes away no matter where you go?

In all my time in Los Angeles, I don’t think I ever once warmed to the place, either. I had so idealized San Francisco and my hometown that they were incomparable. Of course, in hindsight, I realize there were parts of Los Angeles that I very much enjoyed. They may even have rivaled parts of what had become my gold standard in the Bay Area. It only took moving 3,000 miles away, clear across the country, for me to appreciate this place I'd lived for the past five years.

But so it goes. My mind is rarely in the present. Mostly, I'm steadfast in my focus on the past or the future. It’s not healthy, I know. But as I stroll through the crowded streets of Manhattan on blustery winter days, I can't help but feel as though the best times were behind me, that I'd left them in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Because this isn't the kind of place I'm used to. This most certainly isn't the weather I'm used to.

For many reasons, sunsets don't get much better than this one in San Diego.

What I’ve left behind, and what I’m homesick for, is the familiar and the memorable: balmy summer days in the rolling, golden East Bay hills, dotted with the occasional oak tree, looking down on houses and parks and roads below; San Diego sunsets on the cliffs in La Jolla, the roar of the tumultuous ocean in the background; laying on the beach in Santa Monica, my hands covered in sand (because if you put me anywhere near sand, I’m going to start digging, it’s just a fact of life), surrounded by my friends, none of us adventurous enough to jump into the surprisingly freezing water; and the quiet tranquility of my bedroom in Culver City where I could lay on my bed in the afternoon, stare out the window, through the forking branches of the trees just on the other side, to the blue sky up above (it's always a blue sky in this memory), and there isn't anything on my mind but that at this moment, in this place, everything is good.

Admittedly, this one comes pretty close.

I know that the moment I move away from New York, I am going to have the same feeling about my time here. My mind, in its infinite wisdom, will have long erased my doubts, my annoyances and my insecurities about this city. It's like that awful song: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?" The realities of Los Angeles and San Francisco aren't nearly as perfect as my memories lead me to believe (although, let's be honest, San Francisco comes pretty damn close). But, still, I want to go to these idealized places in the memories looping endlessly on that movie projector playing at the back of my head. 

Anyone care to join me?