E.M. LARK

Phoebe Bridgers and I Look For Where The Earth Ends

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It’s cloudy again today in New York City. If I look close enough, I can see where the sun is desperate to break through. Sunlight on the East Coast is more of a special guest than a main cast star but we eagerly wait for her anyway. 

It’s cloudy again and I wonder how it is in California. Where the sun doesn’t stop shining until the sidewalk melts beneath your feet. Where the birds defy the sun and the grass dies and summer lasts forever. I think my niece will like it there, growing up in the cradle of Apollo’s arms.

Home meant summer, once.
The beginning and the end of each day. A place, a person, a thought. A smell, a memory, a taste. 

Summer was the blistering heat at the poolside, familiar faces seeking out their true names, the thought that maybe one day we would all get out of here – together. The longer I look over my shoulder, the more I know what I’ve lost. I couldn’t feel at home anywhere because my body was simply passing through, surviving through any means that I could. The songs that rose behind me covered up the noise, but only for so long.

Home meant freedom, for a while.
The sprawling cityscape of a place far greater and stranger than most anything I’d known. A taste for it on the weekends wasn’t enough, no, I needed it all. Hungry and desperate for everything at twenty-two, I chanced it on the one shot I was given.

And years later, all of that too fell in between the cracks.
Call it grief, call it the dissolution of my twenties, call it betrayal by a friend and a hope and an entire country that didn’t protect us. There is no solace to be found in such an empty house.

It’s hard to call anywhere home these days.
I thought that if I ran fast enough, I could make it out of the darkness that followed me from sea to shining sea. But my feet were never fast enough, and it was there that I drowned alone.

I’ve soliloquized like I knew where the end already was, and that there was nothing left for me but to keep walking until I finally found the edge of the Earth. 

When I go to bed and close my eyes, I can see it all unfolding:

I finally throw everything away and leave it to the flies. What is important, I scarcely know, but it’s there with me. Me and a backpack and the same twenty songs or so on repeat. I soundtrack my apocalyptic walk through dying lands in order to find myself. It’s a Southern California kind of drought in this heart no matter how close I get to the rain. I move the force of my torrential grief through spring, summer, fall, and winter. 

I am looking, looking, looking – and for once in my fucking life I cannot get in my own way. 

I make it past the city, past New Jersey, and I let go of the breath I was holding. 
I always hate these trips, the ones where you get lost in the dark for too long and lose your keys and sound like your dad when you scream. 

But I keep going. I steal a car that looks suspiciously like my old Civic and tear down the cobbled road until I no longer remember what Brooklyn or Manhattan look like, let alone a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey. A part of my consciousness still lives there, suddenly aware, too aware, of the fact that my lungs were breathing air and my heartbeat pounded in my chest.
I run from it even still, unprepared to be awake.

I’m supposed to visit a friend in Nebraska, another in Illinois, Texas, Colorado, everywhere, before I get there. The directions don’t make much sense and I have an old agenda to see someone who’s buried in Orange County instead of alive in Chicago. I try to burn the page but it won’t catch. I singe my fingertips instead, and pretend like I’m not afraid of losing my hands. I can always drive with my feet. I can write with a pen between my lips. I can hold onto you with my words, and hope for the best.

The Civic and the crooners and I keep going and going until I start to recognize the landscape around me. I do not stop to see the sights but I breathe in every familiarity. I might die without them. I am a creature of nostalgia and must feed upon everything I’ve lost; I do not know how to let the dead stay dead. 

But even then, I keep driving through California. I hear my name whistled in the whirl of the Santa Ana winds, the same way I’ve heard it shout in big city traffic. The language of belonging is such a strange one, you never know what it’s really asking of you until you decide to follow it anyway. Maybe I am chasing the sound of it, all the way past my old hometown and all the streets I used to escape from, all the way past every home away from home I knew.

I drive over the edge of the PCH – 

and there is still a stretch of road beneath me. The Pacific Ocean is not my last stop but I am not driving towards the next continent of the Pacific. In fact, I no longer know where I am going. I skid across the gravel road and nearly flip over into the water, but I am spared by the grace of this road that wants me to keep going.

And then I see a rocky cliff. It goes up and up and up and my car screams on the incline. Storm clouds gather but it does not rain over the sea. When I park, I start to look around and hope to see land, but even where I came from has vanished. Nothing behind me and nothing ahead and maybe – maybe this is it. Maybe we’ve made it.

I walk to the edge. I look over.

It’s cold out here, I say out loud. I turn over my shoulder. There’s nothing, no one, there. I look back ahead and expect to see a billboard spelling the end of days, or the face of a god I haven’t known well in years. 

It’s cloudier than I thought it would be.

The first rain drop lands on my forehead, and slides down my cheek. The Earth and I quietly cry together. I slip my headphones back on, wrap my arms around myself in a motherly embrace, and let out a wail. 

I wake up, and my eyes are warm. My heart aches. I clamor for my phone and check my notifications to make sure everyone I love is still alive. I lift my curtain and look out into the overgrown thicket between the apartments, and the blue sky just above it.

I want to go home, I mumble to myself. But the closest I’ve ever felt to home has always been while I’m getting lost. I want to go home. 

The clouds will find their way back sooner or later, and I’ll mostly be okay with it. I will do my best to get up before three PM and participate in the world as it continues to spin out of control. I do not have the balance to keep up with it all. But every time the edge of the cliff looks too promising, I have to remember the water. In my eyes, the sky, the Pacific Ocean, the East River.

I open up the front door and force myself to try and feel alive. 

Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. Maybe I’ll know now where I want to go.

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