Happy Birthday Kimia! Despite it being her day to receive gifts she has kindly given us the gift of this lovely, heartfelt, sun-soaked essay. If after reading it you feel the urge to reciprocate I would recommend giving her Substack a look and perhaps even subscribing if you want to receive more beautiful writing in this vein.
Everyone wins.
Enjoy.
With California in my bones, I am no stranger to the taste of ash behind my teeth. But in mid-March, a splatter of rainfall is expected in Big Sur. That doesn’t stop me from trekking out from San Francisco with two girlfriends and a riot of camping gear in my car to make a temporary home of a campsite so scenic it’s obscene, pulled up kissing close to the coastline. Beyond it glittering, hypnotic, the Pacific Ocean. Neither does the threat of rain deter us from embarking on a midnight picnic that evening, though we are relieved to find the night remains clear.
The journey down to the beach from the campsite is a meandering one. We stomp loudly—if not a little drunkenly—down the path, scaring off any nearby wildlife as we go. Smooth a blanket over the sand, take turns pulling tarot cards. The friend of a friend who brought the deck pulled them from the camper van she lives in with her partner at the campground; she led us here, through the inky dark, and now reads from the guidebook, sharing what knowledge it holds for each beautifully illustrated card. When my turn comes, I don’t pull one. I am the only one not to do so. I regularly pull from my own deck, enough so that I’m tired of demanding answers from elsewhere. I am tired of feeling I have nothing definitive to offer myself.
My friend D and I separate from the other girls, clambering down the bluff to lay claim to an immense weathered log. We are a sleepy warm tumble of tequila and other substances, having scarfed down the mushroom chocolates near the warm sputter of campfire, having brought a second round to drink in a double-walled thermos.
The moon bleaches the scene, spilling its bone-white light through a sieve of night sky. It has long peeled away the glare of daytime, turning a lambent gaze over the sand and the sea, over my limbs which feel oddly but peaceably distant; I am serene with the knowledge that I can tuck them away, keep them like secrets in my pocket. I could do the same with the moon, zip it into my sleeping bag with me, curl up against the cold—and it does get cold. Later, though, in the tent.
For now I am tranquil. Sheer as a wraith. And I can hear this underlying hum to everything, not like the feeling of being watched—not entirely—though many a writer has explicated the shivery sensation of strange gazes on them here, the shapes of tall, spectral figures on the mountain. It’s more that we are being allowed, bestowed with safety and presence. I give D Reiki as she leans on me, both our bodies pressing against the log, my hand steady on the top of her head. The moon is giving me Reiki, too.
There is an attractive Desi couple that arrived earlier that day to camp in the spot next to ours. They brought their young daughter, who earlier showed me a Disney movie on her iPad, who played her game of animal bingo with me. The colorful creatures smile from the scorecard, matching tokens winking back.
On a day not too far in the future, these will become memories she mines for meaning. Or maybe she won’t. She may simply associate them with the blur of emotions attached to the day. The simple happiness of play. The small magic of watching a vibrant animated film that became an instant favorite. Bunny rabbits that scamper through the bush, birds that ride the sea breeze through a pastel wash of sunset, and towering cliffs that spit out their waterfall, uncaring of their fame.
The summer I first camped in Big Sur with my family, having just learned to climb trees, I spent the entire time playing monkey overhead, palms pressed to peeling bark. The summer I read Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby for the first time, I saw myself in her tangle of curls, an electricity of tempestuousness, even developing an obsession with eating entire boxes of Fig Newtons at a time. Same way she did. The summer I first batted hunger back and forth, like a beaten animal, like skin stretched tight as a drum. I could hold my hip bones like hands, like flowers—offerings for an altar to which I did not yet know I prayed.
It was the summer I turned twelve, or was it fourteen? One of my mother’s friends said something about the way I looked in Farsi, a phrase I couldn’t quite grasp. When I asked my mom, she relayed that in English, it meant “I looked like water.” As if anyone could peer right through me. As if something about me appeared unclear, my outlines blurry, wavering. And yet, water is a force. I spent hours swimming laps in the pool, intent upon only this: How many calories could each lap burn? I liked the slice of each movement, the way it made my mind quiet, my body pliant. I looked like water, but felt like so much ash.
Every memory I have of myself at that age—twelve and thirteen and fourteen—has taken on the shape of that particular melancholy. I could taste it like blood at the back of the mouth, an open wound that stretched and reshaped itself, silent and looming until it was not, until it was simply there and there and There, the same way the hunger was. Would I pass the violence of this inner abyss on to a child? How could I want something so deeply when I was so afraid of it?
In Big Sur, I can’t explain my frustration, or maybe it’s that I don’t want to. It comes on sudden and bottomless; but the witching hour threads itself along our hair, our spines, and I am grateful for my ghosts, grateful that I can feel my appetite at all, and that it’s always been more than physicality alone. It doesn’t stop or end, it transforms once and then again.
And isn’t California ravenous, too, in its way? The sea unhinges its jaw to swallow itself, the horizon; what wildness of sky and saltwater hasn’t been devoured meets the shoreline in an embrace, an expanse. They say living here makes you soft, but I painstakingly braided steel into my backbone long ago, and I revel in the cool breath of this night on my skin.
The next morning dawns to the little girl waving goodbye from across the campsite. Her parents quickly stow any remaining supplies into the trunk of their car with the ease of familiarity that graces that kind of outdoorsy family. Their daughter waves, calls goodbye, and I respond in kind. She is younger than I was when it began.
My friends are staying another night, but I head home in an onslaught of rain as bone-white and faded as a years-old scar. I drive, riding hard on the curves of the cliffside, still thinking of yesterday’s moonlight, as silvery as the stray tendrils of gray rising from my temples. Thinking of the way we learn to pray to ourselves on ephemeral altars, ones that are built and soon destroyed, built and then destroyed, crumbling more quickly than we can bear. And yet, we can take the stars from the sky when we remember to, or else offer them our secrets anew.
The awaited deluge has come, and I remember myself.
First, happy birthday! I hope you'll have a wonderful new year filled with happiness and new adventures.
And -- your Big Sur story is giving me so much FOMO! Why didn't I ever lay down on the ground in Big Sur and let life unfold? Why?? I drove through Big Sur and stayed at Deetjen's Inn, but never ventured into nature there. I kick myself for it now. Thank you for sharing this with us so we can experience it through you. Anyone reading this who wonders if they should visit Big Sur and the California coast should wonder no longer: go.
Thanks again for sharing this with us!
Your entire essay was gorgeous, but this part especially will stick with me: "I regularly pull from my own deck, enough so that I’m tired of demanding answers from elsewhere. I am tired of feeling I have nothing definitive to offer myself." Absolutely lovely. Thank you. Aaaaaaand happy happy happy birthday!