Old Hotels in California

Maybe it's the length of the flight, the delta in the time zones...maybe it's the color of the terrain heading west that becomes more barren and brown, far different from the lush greens and perfectly framed crops that I fly over from East to West.

Maybe it's because I'm supposed to be heading home, but that place was burnt down to the ground...figuratively and literally...it feels a bit like a betrayal.  I committed no crimes in California but I feel guilty when I arrive.  Like maybe I should never have left...like maybe I should have come back and grasped some hands, muddled through conversations...I don't know.

There had been love on the coast, at least in disguise...nights with strange girls who wanted to make love on the cliffs above the Pacific, in deep dark nights when fog rolled in and you could hear the sound of the surf as she breathed in my ear.  But it was like when the fog burned off the next morning in the pureness of a bright planet sun...these girls would dissipate and fade.  Never returning but as ghosts in a fleeting memory.  I think I remember first names...barely...freckles, eyes like blue-linen and the smell of suntan lotions.  But those are in a drawer in my mind, next to mixed tapes and the key from an early BMW.

Maybe it's like an old wound, a broken bone that never quite heals...that reminds you when it's about to rain and it dulls and thuds against some nerve.  I'm not sure...but ultimately California leaves me lonely.

And I think it's because it is evidence that I am even further than you than I could ever be.  It's a continent away, suddenly.  Not a mile or a few.  Not a short drive or time in a plane.

I am far away.  And when the distance between us is this black bejeweled gulf that we don't know how to approach it is a starker distance.  I cannot see a moon knowing it might the same time that you are watching.  I'm on the other side.

A side I have been on before.  A part, apart.

Knowingly, willingly separating is like a reminder of how a day can separate us in its minutes, and in its mileage.  Distance is vague...it can be a hundred feet in a rain or a thousand feet in the sun...if I cannot see you I may as well be some place very far.

But in California I know I am far...a deliberate distance, that I have chosen to undertake, even if just for a few days.

Perhaps it doesn't even really matter...perhaps distance is a drug, euthanizing...deadening...not allowing any sort of pain or memory or fondness or drifting into memory occur.  Distance can be a narcotic, an addicting one.

I feel far from you quite often...mostly in the mornings on waking...and then again in the head down upon the pillow time when I get to blink slowly to sleep.

But in this great distance I feel...

nah, I fear...

that I will feel this sensation more acutely because I am in a strange place...a strange place where I was born.  But never really loved.

No, I saved that for elsewhere.  Some place that tonight is far, far away.