When I recall my time with him, I remember mostly that the world was dry—the sun like a razor beam, the Earth various shades of brown, the blue smoke on the horizon—and that my actual life felt very far away. It was almost a dream state, real-feeling and yet not quite, a slur of time and travel I’d eventually wake up from. I still catch myself wondering, occasionally, if those six days in California really did happen.
♦
The San Francisco Bay at sunset is perhaps one of the most iconic sights on the American continent. I knew this, and I’d always wanted to see it myself, yet the scene bored me as I surveyed it from the road’s shoulder. But that was how everything looked in the company of my friend Fin: half-dead. I wish I’d taken that feeling as an indicator, but of course I didn’t. We’d known each other for seventeen years; I hadn’t seen him in twelve. And when I looked at him now, the sun slipping out of the sky beyond the bay, I was almost convinced no time had passed at all, even though I could see its traces on his face, and certainly on mine.
We were on our way back to his house after hiking through the redwoods in the Oakland Hills when he noticed the view. “You must see this,” he told me, scouting for a lookout or a wide shoulder to pull over. I insisted I could see just fine from the passenger-side window, but he objected, turning the wheel to park along the gravely edge. When I stepped out of his car and approached the metal guardrail to get a better look at the bay and the city skyline behind it, I felt nothing. I could not figure out why a scene that should have elicited a small gasp drew out of me only boredom, impatience. We stood there for a while. The long, dry leaves on the eucalyptus trees behind us shook as a gust of wind swept up the hillside, the sky glowed pink. Something was wrong, but I did not know what. “Let’s go,” I said, “I’m hungry.”
♦
We met in college. We’d lived in the same dormitory, just a few doors apart, during our freshman year. We quickly became running buddies, he took me rock climbing a couple times, and we went to several parties together, dressed up for Halloween together. He was one of those guys that was “cute” and “sweet” but never crossed my mind as “dating material.” He was too nice, but I wasn’t into nice boys. Plus, there was Helmi, his Finnish girlfriend. He referenced her often, talking about his year abroad in Finland, and frequently spoke in Finnish, too. That was why everyone on our dormitory floor called him Finland. Even now it felt more natural to call him “Finland” or “Fin” instead of his actual name.
Fin and I saw each other, as friends, on and off throughout college, but never as often as that first year. We studied vastly different subject matter in buildings on opposite sides of the campus, meeting up only occasionally for lunch or a beer. Most of our seventeen-year-long relationship can be retraced through written word: emails, Facebook messages, texts, comments on photos, a rare few notes on paper. Over the years, some of those words pushed the boundaries of friendship, hinted at wanting something more, something deeper.
♦
I’d told him I was hungry, but I wasn’t. I wanted to get on with the evening; I’d seen enough of the bay area landscape for one day, and my curiosity regarding his intentions during my visit was starting to feel intolerable. We needed to do something that required sitting close or ordering alcohol—anything to encourage the collapsing of space between us, just to see what would happen. Even if nothing occurred, I’d be content. I’d know.
The messages between us started small: he’d write to tell me he liked my latest blog post, or ask if I was still dating Kyle, and if so, say hi to him for me. He wrote me everywhere I lived, asking what my life was like in Washington, or Oregon, or Ecuador, or Georgia, saying maybe he’d visit me, if things worked out with his job. He messaged to tell me about how he was going to move to the Bay Area, that I should come check out Berkeley. I always had a place to stay in his house, I was always welcome, he said. Then there were the longer messages between us about his relationship that had just exploded, how my ex-boyfriend cheated on me, how online dating was terrible for us both. He had possible plans to move to Hawaii someday, he said one time, another that he was windsurfing more than ever. But some messages felt more intimate: he would say that he missed me, or that he was sending a BIG HUG. Once, he wrote that he thought I was disarming, that it was one of the things he loved most about me. I reread that message dozens of times.
It was easy, after all that back-and-forth, to feel like I knew him, like we knew each other. Yet we’d hardly even skimmed the surface. I knew what the landscape of his life looked like, I could describe its shapes and colors. But I knew nothing of its weather, its temperament, nothing of the rocks and soils beneath the grass and trees, nor the history that composed it.
He made a suggestion as we lowered ourselves back into his car, the breeze now sharpened by a chill. “How about we go get dinner and a drink at a spot near the art walk? Then we can check that out when we’re done eating.” I imagined walking, slightly buzzed, inhibitions lowered, through a tightly-knit crowd, what possibilities that might allow. I told him, “Sure, yes, that sounds excellent.”
We’d brought up the possibility of visiting each other many times in our messages, but we’d never come close to actually making real plans until last fall. I finally had a job with paid and flexible vacation days, and his October was unexpectedly wide open. I’d been single for five years at that point and the purchase of a plane ticket unleashed my lonely imagination. These amorous fantasies were fueled by two facts: That we were now often emailing each other multiple times a day, and we’d booked a night’s stay at a nudist hot springs, just outside a small town in northern California called Ukiah. Yoo-kye-uh, I said to myself, when I located it on a map.
♦
There are two versions of me at work when I’m interested in someone. There is dreamy Katie, spinning up a thick web of fantasies I can hardly pull apart enough to even glimpse reality, and there’s wary Katie, whose sole purpose is taking a match to that web. I wish I could tell you that these two parts of me operate effectively in tandem, helping me to make exceptional choices in relationships, but, I cannot. Wary Katie exists only because dreamy Katie has made an embarrassing number of poor decisions in love, so she’s also new—rough, under-practiced, unsure of her suspicions.
The dreamy part of me, in this instance, was convinced Fin was interested, that his feelings and fantasies matched mine, precisely. But the wary part of me took note of other occurrences: how he’d vanish from our conversation for a few days if messages became too intimate or flirtatious, or the fact that he asked me not to tell his sister about our plans to travel to a nudist spa, or that he’d dated mostly much younger women, and often across vast distances. How easy it was, though, for me to dismiss all that data as corrupt and unverified when faced with the possibility of not being single anymore.
♦
So, I boarded my flight from Atlanta to Oakland in tights that I knew hugged my thighs just right, my hair swept back into a tousled bun. And as the plane soared across the continent, into darkness, my imagination rolled out not just fantasies of the trip, but constructed whole lives with Fin. I didn’t really want to move to California, though figured I could manage for a couple years. I’d set up a writing studio in one of the front rooms of his old Sears bungalow and he’d saunter in every evening to ask me what I was working on. We’d drink coffee every morning out on his back porch beside the bougainvillea, the sun beaming down out of an effortlessly blue sky.
I had not considered the fog, a rickety deck, nor the possibility that he’d given up the coffee drinking. On my first morning at his house, we had not yet kissed, and I still lacked substantial evidence to indicate whether we would. I’d landed and he’d picked me up at the airport in the same silver Toyota Matrix he’d been driving since college. We’d gone out for tacos, crawled into bed separately, and had woken up early the next day. Now I stood, leaning against the bright blue formica and watched as he made us muesli. He spooned the mixture into two bowls and carried them out to the dining room, placing them on the glass tabletop, thick swirls of steam rising up out of each and getting caught in the beam of sun that poured in through the window. We had a long day ahead of us around Oakland and Berkeley, and up into the redwood groves east of the city. I thanked him for the muesli and brought the cup of coffee to my lips.
“Have you ever thought about giving up coffee?” he asked, sitting down at the end of the table. The sun was shining directly into my eyes, making him look cast in shadow, a medium shade of blue. I squinted.
“It’s the one thing I have done every morning of my life for the past thirteen years,” I said, taking another sip.
“I get it,” he began, “but have you ever tried quitting it long enough to notice how it affects your mood?”
“How long is long enough?”
“I’m not sure. A few months maybe?”
“Then no,” I answered, but I was curious. “How did it affect your mood?”
“I don’t know. I just sort of felt happier after a while without the caffeine. You might feel happier, too.”
This sliver of advice should have told me everything I was so desperate to know, but of course, I ignored it. I’m always so optimistic about love, and later, so eternally horrified.
We left the house after breakfast and spent the entire day driving and walking around the East Bay, hiking around the redwoods in the Oakland Hills, looking out at the San Francisco Bay as the sun set beyond it. After our dinner and drink and art walk, we ended up on a small couch at the edge of his kitchen, sitting side by side as we paged through an old atlas of New York. At one point, he leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I’m going to bed,” he said, “you can come, too, if you want.”
♦
I really only know a thin ribbon of California—the redwoods near its northern border with Oregon, where many years ago I spent my twenty-fifth birthday; Route 5 through the center, past Mount Shasta with its big, snowy dome, down to Sacramento; and then drifting westward, to the 101, along the Pacific, the sea below like a vast, blue jewel. The terrain does not at all resemble the East Coast, where the land slopes gently into the ocean, but is broken, cleaved, composed of rocky cliffs and headlands that vanish abruptly into the water.
Our drive from Oakland to the hot springs was broken up by a detour to Muir Woods and lunch overlooking the sea. We’d kissed a handful of times at this point, had gone to bed together twice. We’d cuddled on his couch all morning the previous day, delaying our trip across the bay into San Francisco. He held onto me so tightly, more tightly than any man ever had done before. I remember thinking that I should have enjoyed being held like that, but something about it felt strange. I lay there beside him, wary Katie creeping up into my thoughts again: This feels like he’s not holding me but holding onto a body, like I could be anyone. But I turned away from those thoughts—I wanted to believe things were unfolding as I hoped. I wanted to believe he might love me.
Coffee, despite Fin’s giving it up and thinking I should too, was still a big part of our time together. I brewed it every morning (he’d always take a few sips), and we visited a couple cafes in San Francisco, in Berkeley. I had wanted to stop in Ukiah at a roaster called Black Oak, but by the time we passed it, it had already closed.
Our final destination was just a few miles northwest of Ukiah. We followed a long, meandering road off the highway, eventually slipping into a valley, and I watched the landscape shift from brown to green. The mountains in the distance vanished, replacing themselves with low, verdant hills, and the brittle grasses became sprawling ferns. I was feeling increasingly agitated with each mile; both the space around us and the time ahead of us were quickly compressing. We had two days left together and I needed to know what our future held. I’d asserted that he was interested in me, but for what purpose, and for how long? Did he want more or was this little trip all that was in store for us?
The urge to ask him these questions pressed sharply against my insides, trying to find a way out, but I kept myself tightly braced. I wanted to maintain the hope that my long bout of loneliness, of being single, would soon be over. Maybe our weekend trip would never quite end, maybe we’d move back to New York together, someday, and until then, we’d walk the perimeter of Lake Merritt, shaded by the spindly little oak trees.
♦
We arrived at the hot springs late, the sky already completely black, the clouds that had followed us north now gone, a thick stream of stars visible, curling between the treetops. The other visitors were mostly young couples and a few older women with long gray hair and beaded necklaces. You were allowed to be nude anywhere, though most people dressed to cook in the kitchen and to eat in the dining room. We were hungry, but we made a beeline for the springs, quickly stripping down in the locker room, showering outside, and sliding into the steaming water, crystal clear and bubbling. The water was blue, I’d learn the next day, due to mineral content, but at night it appeared colorless.
I wanted to count myself among the other couples in our vicinity. I wanted to be like them, a part of something real, this brief stay in a yurt in the redwoods not an aberration but an initiation—our starting point. For most of the evening, I convinced myself I did exist among these other pairs seemingly in love. I also made a concerted effort to ignore the older women cooking and eating and bathing alone, shining with contentment as they went about their tasks. I have always been frightened of women like that, visibly happy without a whiff of marriage on them. I have always been frightened that I will become one of those women. That I already am one of those women.
We moved in and out of the pools, the hot ones, the warm ones, the rocky ones at the edge of the forest, the claw foot tubs up on the roof. And it was on the rooftop, floating gently in the loose clasp of his arms, my face against his neck, when my desire to know became unbearable. Were we like the other couples? Was this real? When I left California in two days, would he still want to see me, or would we just go back to being friends who occasionally sent each other flirty messages? But I kept my mouth shut until we’d both showered and returned to our yurt in socks and warm pajamas and crawled under the covers.
♦
That I perceived this man as sweet was the only thing that allowed the words to spill out of me when I knew that there was a chance he would not feel the same way I did. We lay together, under the quilt, our pajamas in a tangled ball at the foot of the bed. I managed to gather the courage to speak by looking past him, staring instead at the walls of the yurt: the wooden frame sturdy and polished to a glow. But there was a little last-minute panic, a stall after I’d blurted out: “I have a question I need to ask you.”
As soon as I made it known that there was something I needed from him, the yurt lost its sense of contained stability and became cavernous, and the space between us a greedy, hungry void. The situation suddenly seemed preposterous: that I had opened my mouth, that I was about to ask him such a terminal question when there was no escape, nowhere to go.
“What is it?” Fin asked me.
I focused my gaze on the walls of the yurt as I opened my mouth to speak.
“Well, I guess… I guess I just want to know how you feel about me, about all this. Like, if you want this to maybe continue after I leave on Tuesday…?” My voice trailed off as if it knew better than I did about what was coming.
He looked stunned, but did not pull away from me, and when he spoke, his voice was thick with sympathy, confusion.
“Katie, I think… I think we’ve only slept together twice.”
My throat tightened. Had he really just said that? Did he really think I’d fallen for him because we’d slept together two times? How far back does he think my feelings travel? How far back do his? My eyes began to burn, I felt the usual surplus of words drain from my head.
“It’s not about that,” I stammered. “You think this is because we’ve had sex twice?” I was too mortified to offer him the synopsis of my deepening feelings over the years, but I’d given myself away without saying a word about them.
He spoke but said nothing, his voice loosely threaded with apology. There was a little guilt in his tone, too, as if it weren’t a complete surprise that I might want more than six days. He tried to hug me, but the gesture felt flimsy, rooted in pity. I pulled away. In all my fantasies about how this might turn out, good or bad, I’d never imagined this. I couldn’t imagine my way out of it, either: how I’d get through the next day, stuck beside him in the springs, in his car, in his house.
I went to bed in tears, red-faced, eyes puffy. I lay turned away from him, silently cursing my stupidity, my desperate desire to be loved, and imagined the earth boiling beneath us, pouring out into the cool forests, puffs of steam seeping out of the soil. Here, in Ukiah, you were forced to remember the Earth was not laid down quietly or neatly. Its assemblage was not perfect. It collides and grates and erupts. And we’d come here to enjoy the pleasant side effects of all that violence, all that mess. Our bed sheets crisp and white, the quilt folded back cleanly, the stained wood smooth and gleaming, everybody naked and happy and seemingly at peace.
I moved in and out of tears the next morning. The steaming pools were blue, I could now see, and perfectly translucent. Couples moved around us, lay naked in the sun, crawled into baths, plunged into the ice-cold pond, laughing, holding hands. But we were not like them.
♦
After we drove away from the springs, we headed further down into the valley, looking for a redwood grove Fin had heard was especially beautiful. I stared out of the window at the trees as we drove, marveling at their height, the thickness of their trunks, that they’d remained firmly planted in one place for hundreds of years. I was not proud of my behavior, but I couldn’t snap out of my stupor. I alternated between anger and sadness, thoughts heaving their way around my skull. Didn’t he know!? Couldn’t he tell from my messages that I’m looking for love? That a weekend tryst in an overpriced yurt was not what I had in mind? Why doesn’t he want me, too? I was wrong about a man, again. Wary Katie had been right, again. Why did I never listen to her?
We spent the afternoon walking around the woods, dipping in and out of little grottos, occasionally stumbling into a beam of sunlight that had somehow made it through all the branches and foliage down to the forest floor. There were sometimes clearings, or fallen, rotted logs, root systems exposed, drying in the open air. Narrow streams cut through and around us, and we stepped across the water carefully, on wide, flat stones. I usually led the way, often walking just a bit too quickly, forcing him to chase me. There were long silences, punctuated with sudden bursts of conversation.
“I do love you, Katie, I always have. You’re my friend. Can’t you just be happy that there is a person who loves you as best he can?”
No, I thought, I cannot. I didn’t want him to love me as just a friend. Why was I worthy of one type of love but not the other? I pressed him further. We’d both been single for years, we were obviously attracted to one another, and neither of us wanted to stay in the cities we were living in; couldn’t we make it work? Wasn’t this, wasn’t I, at least worth trying?
“I don’t want to be in another long-distance relationship,” he said, “I’ve already been in too many.” I paused walking and turned to look him in the eye, the flimsy nature of this excuse readily palpable. “And I need to be with someone calmer than me, Katie. Someone more stable than I am. I don’t do well in the wind, I want to stay out of it.”
I was on the verge of exploding but restrained myself to avoid proving his point, not knowing that I already had. That my crying the night before, earlier that day, that my little spouts of anger, that they, I, had already frightened him.
He did not want to invite storms into his life, he said. Insulted, I fired back. “You’ve known me for years! Have been hearing about my life for years! How can any of this surprise you about me?” My question was met with only a blank stare and silence. I was furious now, and kept going, no longer concerned I was churning out proof of his accusations: that I more closely resembled a squall rather than the rock he was looking for. “What have you been playing at? What did you want from me?”
“Something fun and easy,” he said.
“You’re thirty-seven! Aren’t you tired of fun and easy?” I asked him. “And you know me. You know my history. Did you really think I wanted something fun and easy?” Another stare, more silence. The quieter he became, the louder I got. “What do you even love about me? Why did you want this?” I did not get any answers. I stormed off ahead of him, disappearing down a hill littered with nurse logs, those dead and decaying trees whose fallen corpses supply nutrients to all the little saplings trapped in the understory, unable to drink enough light.
♦
Because I am optimistic and wired toward hopeful fantasy, and because I struggle to learn from romantic failures, I have memories of the redwoods and the roads twisting through them. Of the Pacific Ocean from a rocky outcropping and our legs swinging below us as we sat at its edge, the gleam of the sun on the sea blinding. I have memories of working up sufficient courage to ask a question despite being terrified of the answer. And I have memories of not being able to behave myself when I got an answer I’d never considered. I have memories of this man telling me that my anger had frightened him, that, even though he did love me, he was relieved to see me go. And I have the memory of riding in a cab to the airport, tearful, desperate to hang onto this parched spot of earth. He was here; I would soon not be. And he was glad.
There are moments when I’m sorry I that went out there, sorry that we wrecked our friendship. There are moments when I think perhaps he and I might have been better left in a dream state, at rest in the shape of a question mark. But I don’t stay too long thinking this way. I know the endless wondering would have eventually gotten to me, that I’d have flown out there someday to see for myself, to pick up that stone and peer beneath before letting it slam back into the soil.
Now, when I look back on those six days, what holds more weight is the landscape. The golden hills, dry and tousled in the breeze, the purple smoke in the distance, the road winding into the forests of giant trees, the sky knotted with stars at night. The landscape and how I fit into it—how I longed for it before and after, but how when I was there, within it, it did not speak to me, and I could not love it.
♦
A few weeks after I returned to Atlanta from California, I went to a wedding in the North Georgia Mountains. I didn’t know anyone except the groom, so I spent most of the afternoon making stilted attempts at polite conversation with a table of strangers. The wedding was at Cloudland Canyon, a spot I knew fairly well, and it had been a beautiful, clear day. I thought my evening might be better spent watching the sunset from the canyon rim and ducked out of the reception once everybody was busy dancing. I found my car parked in a patch of woods that shimmered with rosy light, turned my key in the ignition, and drove off toward the trailhead.
The air was bright, crisp, and I shivered in my thin skirt and sleeveless blouse, my feet sockless in ballet flats. I walked out along the rim trail, following it until I reached its end: a narrow, rocky outcropping with a wide view of the canyon floor below. It was late October but most of the foliage was still green, only a few tufts of yellow and orange scattered across the dense canopy. I looked out at all of it: the sloping canyon walls, the expanse of space along the bottom, how it opened up into flatlands to the north. The sun was still visible out there, a pink wash over the fields and farms, its shadows long and blue, the milky sky working its way toward colorlessness. I let out a small gasp, felt a little flare in my chest.
I wondered, why did this canyon thrill me when the San Francisco Bay had not? Had I fallen out of love with more dramatic vistas? Had my preferences changed? Or did the issue, perhaps, have nothing to do with landscapes? Before I went out to California last fall, I’d already imagined and rehearsed in my mind every possible scenario. Everything I saw or experienced stood beside a projection, an expectation cultivated in my imagination. When I walked out into Cloudland Canyon, I expected nothing.
I asked myself as I stood there at the ledge: Did I love Fin? Had I ever really loved him for who he was? I leaned forward, my elbows resting on the rock wall that held me back from the cliff, from hundreds of feet of free-fall to the ground below. Or had I fallen in love with a well-crafted idea of him? How many blanks had I filled in so that I could imagine a world in which I was no longer alone? I’d propelled myself toward that world full force only to discover that it was an apparition, that I could not land in it, just fly right through.
Longing is not love. Fantasies are slippery. For how much longer would I be single? That was an answer I had no access to.
I stood on the rim trail alone, the light fading quickly, the chill thickening and spreading through the air. I took my camera and placed it on a rock, pointed back toward the overlook, and set the timer for ten seconds. I walked out in front of the lens and turned to face it, smiling.
Occasionally, I’ll still buy coffee online from the shop we had intended to visit in Ukiah. But when I sip that coffee, I don’t think of him, not anymore. I recall the drive instead, the winding roads through the redwoods, descending deeper into the valleys that eventually bled out into the ocean, becoming darker and cooler and greener as we went down, the sun-bleached hills a distant memory, an old dream. This is California, always, in my imagination. Shaded and dewy above ground, but beneath, the earth roiling, hot, desperate for an exit.