Off-Script in Cali, 2/14/15

I’m off-script too because, honestly, I’m an off-script person.

It’s been about nine months since I left San Francisco for good (for now), and this morning I find myself back here for the first time, sitting in a Westin SFO hotel room watching the sunlight stream in, about to board a plane back to Detroit. I came back for an interview, and then right afterwards I boarded BART to San Francisco for dinner. And then I had an out-of-body experience. Because there’s an imprint of me – a younger, angrier version of me – who was riding BART with me. She had longer hair and fuller cheeks and a little less inspiration. She didn’t think she’d be here now, wearing a suit, spending her $150 per diem on dinner. (Yes, there is waste in the system. The Japanese call this muda, and it’s a true thing that there’s no such thing as a perfect system. So, why should I company give me $150 to spend on food when it’s a waste? Because, as it turns out, people are the only thing worth wasting on. And if you can get good people to join your team for $150, sometimes maybe that feels like a pittance.) Below is what the angrier version of me had to say about all this. And here’s what the me today feels about: “your anger is beautiful, and it will probably come back some day, and that’s okay.” Because the best thing I ever learned from you all is to live in the dualities.

***

California

I tell her that it’s not that I’m afraid of driving, exactly, it’s that I just hate doing it. I hate doing it just like I hate riding bikes, which I can’t do because I’m afraid of it. My brother once put me on a multi-gear bike downhill into a lake, and now I can’t ride bikes.

“Do you avoid driving?” she asks me.

“Yes, basically at all costs,” I answer. “I’ll find any excuse not to do it.”

“Avoidance is a classic symptom of phobia,” she replies.

I shake my head. “But I’m really not a person who’s afraid of things, generally. I love air travel. I’ve moved apartments, cities, and jobs without thinking twice about it.”

“It’s a funny thing to be a person who has such a big life but has limited it by refusing to drive,” she says.

“Right?” I mock, looking for humor, not bowing to the implied cruelty in her words. “Why would I intentionally make my world small?”

“Okay,” she relents. “Tell me what it feels like when you get behind the wheel.” Sometimes she surprises me. Sometimes she doesn’t ask the obvious question, like, “I don’t know, why would you make your world intentionally small?”

So, fine. I’ll tell you what it feels like. It feels like my mom’s mom once had to drive to the grocery store because her husband, my grandfather, was away on business, and she drove a car downhill into a ditch. She had to place a call to her brother-in-law to bail her out. She never drove again. It feels like my dad’s mom once got into a car accident so atrocious that she didn’t leave her bed for a month after. She never drove again. It feels like my own mom stopped driving thirty years ago and has never considered getting a new license because why should she, really, when the subway line is half a block from our apartment in New York and my dad is a perfectly good driver? It feels like my aunt, my dad’s sister, almost didn’t go through with her move to the suburbs because she was panicked about driving. It feels like, how much inherited trauma do I carry with me and don’t even know about? It feels like every time I’m behind the wheel maybe there’s a ditch I’ll drive into or a person I’ll kill or a better driver I will find out there, ready to take this wheel from my unworthy hands.

We have this conversation in Oakland, on a beautiful cul-de-sac about a mile from Piedmont near the lake. I habitually remember nothing about the place: not the street it’s on, nor the house number, nor even, frankly, my therapist’s name (Marly? Marnee? Marty?). All I know is how to get there, and when I arrive, I buzz a doorbell, and I sit on Marnee’s couch and take off my shoes. It’s always been a long day at work, or I’m always tired. There’s a pillow and chenille blanket on Marnee’s couch, but I don’t remember the color of either. I hate this place. I hate Oakland. I work in an abandoned school sandwiched between two freeways, and the great hilarity is that I can’t drive myself home. I hate Oakland because everyone else loves it, which makes me hate it even more. I hate how it’s always sunny. I hate how there aren’t any people on the sidewalks.

She has asked me what it feels like to drive. “I don’t know,” I finally say in response.

“Do you ever picture yourself driving?” she asks.

“All the time,” I say. “I picture myself on the freeway with the window slightly cracked, with the wind in my hair. It’s California, always. I’m always effortlessly merging and changing lanes. I’m always driving a little too fast, I’m a little too skinny, and I always have a can of coke in the cup holder.” I pause for effect. “I don’t drink soda, by the way. In other words, I’m always roleplaying Joan Didion.”

She doesn’t laugh. I don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t get the reference or if it’s because it isn’t funny. Marnee is a strange woman. She looks like the actress who plays Madame Maxime in the Harry Potter movies: very tall, very bent in the spine, with short dark hair and eyeglasses that hang from a chain. How terrible, I think, to look like that. How hard it must be to find love. And then I check myself. What if mine is the body that can’t be loved?

“So you must love California, then. You must be sad to leave it.”

I’m counting down the days, actually. There are times I’m so desperate to leave that I wander in loops around Duboce Park and realize that the only person walking with me – in fact, walking the same exact route, following me, really – is the same homeless woman I see around the Lower Haight all the time. She has tightly-curled, very frizzy hair cropped close to her head and drags alongside her a navy blue sleeping bag. She looks like someone I could’ve grown up with, a Ruth or a Samantha or a Rebecca, except for the fact that she whispers indecencies to herself and has the mad, scratching-of-arms look of someone high on crack. I’d never smelled crack before I moved here. I would feel badly for her except for the fact that I am spending all my time and energy feeling badly for myself. “There’s a little part of you that loves feeling unhappy,” a friend of mine says. It’s true. Who could deny a thing as true as that?

In response to Marnee, regarding my imminent departure: “Sad isn’t the word that comes to mind.” I’m aware of how I look. My shoes are off, and I rest my elbows on my knees. My coat is draped across my shoulders. I’m sweating profusely, and my face feels shiny. I’m too caffeinated, and my feet have trouble staying planted on the floor. Every now and then I roll my left ankle and hear it give a satisfying pop.

“No? So, you aren’t sad to leave?” she asks, wide eyed, which is the characteristic way people respond when I say I’m leaving California. I hate when Marnee repeats what I say. I hate when we get off-topic. I hate when we’re on-topic.

No, I feel like telling her. Every morning I wait for the N Judah and wonder, what’s the point of all the apps? All of the Series A rounds? All of the deals and meetings and events? Every morning is sunny. Every morning someone is optimizing their stock options. Every morning everyone is well-hydrated and full of ideas. Every night is filled with bonfires in which we eat nothing but quinoa. These are the years in which we “normalize” all of our sadness. I hold a gnawing fear there’s no way out, that everything will feel this way forever, or that the escape hatch is, stunningly, a very tame-looking four-door sedan that will eventually kill me on some inglorious freeway somewhere in this great state. It’s not lost on me, by the way, that my new chosen home is arm’s length from The Motor City.

“I don’t think this is where I’m supposed to be,” I say, but what I don’t say is that I’m afraid of saying this out loud. I’m afraid of being the one at the party who wants hormones in my milk and red meat in my tacos and French fries instead of salad. I’m afraid of wishing for the rain, or the snow, or a serious (but not too serious) acute illness to test who really loves me and who just says they do. I’m afraid to say that every time I get in a car I think of my two ex-boyfriends, like bookends, who taught me to drive, each in his respective fuel-efficient car so that I never got to enjoy a real roar of an engine the way I’ve always imagined. I’m afraid to say that every time I land in a new city I imagine there’s someone at the airport waiting for me and then feel the inevitable stomach sinking disappointment when there isn’t.

“Well then, where are you supposed to be?” she asks, and because I know she means it in a sincere way, I don’t roll my eyes.

I smile, and think: on the 101, heading south. The windows cracked, the wind in my hair, music playing on the radio. Until the sun sets red on the horizon, the day turns to night, and I’ve left this whole place behind.