Evolving Language for the California Cowboy

I used to feel like a woman under the influence.

I’m home. Two feet on the ground. The light is shining on me and yet, I’m torn in two. Absolutely apart from myself.

To say the past few months I have been in a funk would be a meek use of my words. Growing colder, the sky whiter and more frightening. I was becoming very afraid of myself. With immense pain also comes grateful clarity. Now back in the California sun I could see the new power of this clarity. I can see for miles, not out at the golden landscape which formed me but for miles into something beyond what my heart could previously see.

Before I left for California I saw a quiet film about a cowboy who lost his home. He spends time with his daughter as he slowly rebuilds a new kind of home, even through loss and confusion. After the lights came up the actor in the film came into the theater. I have admired him for years and enjoyed hearing him speak, but he was no cowboy. I love cowboys. My favorite people are cowboys. Lone travelers looking for something only they seem to know exists. In my best summer dreams I have wanted to go off and become a cowboy deep in the Palm Springs desert. Let my bare feet run around the belly button cactuses that sprinkle the ground. Put my ear to the hot sand and listen to my entire future in the thumping. Maybe find my fellow California cowboy and settle down.

When I came home my dad picked me up from the airport and the first thing I did was show him a 25 minute film I had made of all of the mini dv tape footage from when I was a baby. My dad and I on a roadtrip, in an aquarium, visiting his mother in Los Angeles, at the Zoo, on the carousel, teaching me how to swim, taking me on a walk, watching movies together on the living room floor. It had been difficult for me to edit. The footage is hard to watch back. Through immense pain comes grateful clarity. I thought for certain the film would get some tears out of him. I was disappointed when the TV in his bedroom went to black and I looked over at a dry face in his rocking chair.

Being home was a life-giving blessing. The sunshine replenished my weakened spirit. I jumped into the ocean as my sisters watched huddled under a towel together. 60 degrees is too much for a San Diego winter but now I can’t even feel a chill at home. I spent time in the dusty veins of the cliffs near the nude beach. I took photographs on my Minolta and ate my lunch on Mount St. Miguel which overlooks my home. I went to LA with my mother. We drove around Laurel Canyon and I filmed on my Super 8mm camera out the passenger window at the winding hills. She let me make my small pilgrimage to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank where everyday David Lynch would have a chocolate milkshake and hot coffee. I had the same and looked out the window across the street to the bungalow where I used to take acting classes. I was always afraid back then but I still did everything. Being in the diner helped me remember those weeks leading up to my final decision to move to New York. I had never planned on New York. One day I woke up and I knew and I would not be swayed. To be a California cowboy or just a cowboy? Going out at it alone. I do not know what possessed me. The SSRIs I was taking or the sweet promise of freedom or the cabin fever of the last year inside. Whatever it was, that push to walk bravely into it, I fear I don’t have that now. Now I want to cower. Go back home and sedate myself in the peace and love of my family and my warm, warm, home.

My Grandmother’s home. The home of her 13 grandchildren, my cousins and I. The color of it was a burnt yellow, like the sun over a ridge. She would never lock the front door. The two gates on the sides of the house, the one that led to the fountain on the left of her yard and the rose garden on the right, clanged with the whooshing past of our running. Our endless games, Christmas mornings, dinner always on the stove and counter, towels in the laundry room for when we’d walk to the pool down the street, the Mexican paintings on the wall, even the painting of the man in the cowboy hat with the eyes that would follow you, our play room with the trundle bed, the chess table near the large windows, the patio chair where my Grandfather would smoke, the big bathtub, the living room where we’d lay out all the blankets and sleep side by side on the floor, is gone. It has all been painted white, the carpet now wood, the walls now bare. It’s cold inside now. We had one last dinner together in the house a few weeks ago. We went to the pool beforehand and took showers in my Grandmothers bathroom. Her bed is gone now and the room is empty save for plastic boxes with old pictures and papers of an entire life lived. We touched the clothes in her walk in closet and tried to find the clothes she kept of my grandfather. A few ties and his slippers.

We sat on her big chair as we waited for the rest of us to finish getting dressed. As we waited, we found a binder from my Aunt’s old boyfriend. A high school boyfriend named Mike. The binder was full of old love letters, photos of ski trips, movie tickets, and prom pictures. We read all the letters and brought them out to the dinner table for the moms to look at over their glasses of wine. “Mike and Erica forever”. It brought some laughs and my Aunt told us how she ran into him a year ago at a Karaoke bar. She told us he was with his new fiancée. She felt his eyes on her the whole night. It was nice to read love letters from a sweeter time, even with the spelling errors. In one letter where he talked about lining the driveway up to her house with rose petals on her 18th birthday. Even when my Aunt remembered the cheating and the jealousy of the relationship, the words on the notebook paper still felt true. We used to speak earnestly about each other, even if 20 or so years later, we knew we’d be laughing at the scribbling of a young person in love.

Anyone who has driven down a California freeway at night knows the magic that they hold. Conversations. The lights passing and the miles passing, looking out into the old dark. The space between the wheel and the passenger seat becomes impossible not to fill with all the things we never said before.

I was worried about revealing too many of my mother’s secrets here, but it is in the end the truth.

On the weekend my parents found out they were pregnant with me, they were in LA at a teachers conference. There my mother met the California Senator. After I was born she would consider running away with him. My first visits to LA involved visits to his bungalow home in the hills. One of my favorite teddy bears was one he gifted me. He almost wrote me a letter of recommendation to UCLA, but I refused, wanting to get in on my own merit. I never did and I never forgot him. In the back of my mind I imagined that if my mom had chosen him I would have had a very different, maybe a better, life. It wasn’t until recently on the drive home from our LA trip together that I realized the truth of it. From the 101 to the I-5 my mom recounted the story of her years with the California Senator. Now that I am much older the story transformed in my ears. With immense pain comes grateful clarity. My mom really loved him. From before I was born to when I was a little girl. But in the end she chose herself instead of chasing his indifference and his refusal to commit. As we passed San Juan Capistrano and the swallows that guard the freeway, I realized it. For almost all intents and purposes my mom had been in a situationship for most of the early 2000s. The almost father of my imagination. The one I could pin all the best fatherly behaviors on and LA family dreams on. Especially when times got tough with my own father. These were fantasies and these were not the truth. The truth was that in my mother choosing herself she also chose me.

Now as an adult I get stuck in these fantasies with others. Go back and read any of my other pieces of writing. It is glaringly obvious. Trapped in the loop of looking into your eyes and you looking into mine. In yours I see entire oceans spiral out of the dark of your pupils. But maybe you were just looking at me because I had something on my face.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the evolving language around love. Maybe I am showing my cards now, grossly inexperienced and sorry for it, trust me, I am so so sorry for it. But this notion keeps tugging at me. The way we speak about love has changed, but WE as loving humans have not. Leaving us talking about the same sincere experiences but not using the same sincere words. Today, language surrounding our relationships trample around the core of our hearts. Leaving us as a younger generation feeling behind, held back, obstructed. Looking at the loving stories of generations before as nonpareil to our own because of the words used to tell them. But my hunch is we are still loving with the same potency and intensity but our words do not do these moments justice. The words are non-committal even out of our mouths, leaving less room for pure golden love between the pauses and the breaths of our stories. If we keep language around our love casual and afraid, then what can we expect of how we view ourselves in love and thus in life. Language is essential and influential and we must treat the words we speak as the sacred prayers that they are. Call it what it is. Use the words that may frighten you and make fools out of yourselves. I love, I love, I love. These will be the words that change the course of your life. I loved, I loved, I loved. Be the Cowboy and choose these lightning bolts carefully, you never know what you may shock to life within your own. Cowboys don’t run their mouth so don’t run away from your love.

I used to feel like a woman under the influence. Now I just feel like a woman who is loved.