Member-only story
The End of California
Grieving for the home I loved, now lost.
On Christmas last year, I stood in the kitchen with my roommate and another friend, cooking a somber dinner. None of us said much. We’d all called our families earlier in the day, our trips home long-since cancelled. We were doing our best to conjure some sort of holiday spirit, but our hearts were hanging low like the North Coast clouds outside. A song came on shuffle, “I Am California” by John Craigie, and as if on cue, when the chorus hit, we all began to sing in unison:
So drink all my wine. Cut all my trees. Make love on my beaches. Smoke all my weed. I am California, can’t you see? Wherever you roam, you’ll always want me.
That song, and our feelings that day, I can only describe as mournful. We shared a deep sense of loss, so obvious in our singing that to name it aloud now feels like an insult to it. It wasn’t the loss of a holiday with my family, but the incalculable loss of the past year. I mourned for the way that sometimes, trying to make the most if it still can’t make enough. I mourned for the fires, for the forests, for loss of the future I grew up thinking I could have. But in that moment, I mourned, more than anything, for California.
I mourned because I knew then that California was dead.
