I took a ketamine lozenge proscribed by someone else's therapist with Angie, Demetri, and a few UC Berkeley PhD students. We began to talk about home. One of the students started rocking on her back, telling me she can feel the distance from where she was born to Berkeley inside her bones. “I'd be happier if I were there,” she says, "but I'll never be there." 

Her formulation is beautiful. It reminds me of how everyone used to live inside their mother. “Are you sure,” I ask her, “that home exists? Maybe you want to go somewhere impossible.” 

A few days later, I tell Roberto that I think the word for home is an artful projection: you imagine a place that can give you what you need, and then you assign your desire to it. A need expressed in spatial metaphor.

He smiles, and says he isn't sure, “doesn't it just, like, mean love?”

Flatness is on the rise.  

Everyone I know describes a sort of blurriness left over from when we lived in isolation and knew each other only through the screens. A fuzziness grew over reality and gave everything a depthless quality. In the months right after we were permitted back into society, I remember swiping at dull conversations, retrained to economize my attention. 

San Francisco is unique in the extremity with which technology inks out of its screens and onto the physical particularity of place. Silicon Valley's wealth has left a wake of ruin: condos in the place of victorians, ghost kitchens replacing family businesses, rides from strangers instead of friends, phones guiding people with functionality instead of curiosity. All the moulding is being stripped from the gap between the ceiling and the wall and thrown away, making the rooms more expensive and similar. Everything I'm sentimental about was also once a destructive new force, wiping out what'd come before. 

 As a teenager, I thought nothing was real and I was in tune with this city perfectly. I grew up here and then returned, staggering, multiple times with romantic notions of belonging.

Writing about the artists Liz Hernández and Ryan Whelan's upcoming presentation at The Armory Show, I was introduced to Mixe linguist Yásnaya Aguilar’s essay “A modest proposal to save the world.” In it, Aguilar posits that a radical understanding of general reciprocity might undo the environmental ruin of insatiable progress. She argues that we must understand our neighbors as fundamental to our own lives, and then extend the definition of neighbor to include living, but non-human entities, like water, soil, or air.

“You are part of a place,” Hernández simplifies, “like it or not.” 

People in pursuit of utopia, of ungrounded pleasure, fall into the trap of “no place,” losing the world to nowhere. Utopia, progress, and the logic of technological innovation conveniently take away the real and its responsibilities. But what’s left?

My friend Lucas once sent me an article about how the new houseless-ness might be defined by immobility as ecological collapse makes a season of every region inhabitable. That seems true, and the thought of losing context in order to have shelter terrifies me.

I was out with a friend at 3 AM and overtaken by Oakland at that hour. It was a place transformed by stillness. The air had a direct quality, buildings were better outlined than usual, and then suddenly I was in a memory of how I used to panick so much I had to be removed from the classroom as a small child whenever I’d fixate on the unknowability of other people. It was a physical affliction. I'd get stuck staring at their heads, the edge that blocked me from them, and them from me, desperate for a way in or, out, I wasn’t sure, the question ricocheting, then teacher’s enormous hands on my shoulders steering me out for short quick breathes in the yard.

 The middle of the night cuts a hole in day to make perimeter inconsequential. 

Out late again, on my bike at 1 AM, I saw two male deers with platonic antlers standing on the yellow lines of Market Street. I slowed and they froze. We passed each other so close that any sudden movement would find us touching. The world was perfectly still.

Someone asked me if I was going to be vulnerable in these newsletters, so I'll say that recently I forgot the words for “letting go,” and choked all over them, describing at length how I’ve been trying to slowly coax myself into relaxing a fealty to the past, how I’ve been so focused on stilling and hollowing the present moment lately, I’m forgetting to live, waiting instead for memory to flood me with the painful reverie of what’s already come. The next morning Instagram suggested a self-help infographic, large text in a crude comic sans, that says: “You Deserve to Let Go.” And I thought, oh yeah, I forgot that's how you say it. 

two drawings of dogs by Earl Swanigan and a .jpg I found on an old USD.

Aki's reading Jane Eyre. She tells me about two lovers bound by red thread tied to their ribcages. It sounds Victorian, vague, and romantic at first, but Aki describes the physicality of that binding, the deep internal pain, the nausea, how it would wrench. How it would feel like a pendulum wrenching at its farthest arc. 

That, I say, sounds like home.