What am I still doing here??

An old epiphany from a new angle

Biking home tonight down Telegraph, the world looked exactly the same as fucking always before me, even as I saw it with new eyes. Even the newest of eyes can’t change something I’ve been looking at for so goddamn long.

But still, I was made anew.

I hate it here! I thought. God almighty, I hate it here!

A thought I’ve had before, but always in misery. I would walk the streets composing songs about how ugly the houses were and how soul-crushing I found the thought of ever buying one, how if I lived here for the rest of my life I would have utterly failed. But that could always have been the depression talking, right?

Only now, I’m not depressed! I’m not even unhappy! I just hate Berkeley. God how liberating to see that with clear eyes.

It’s not about the place, whatever, it has its problems, it has its charms. It’s not about the place; it’s about the fact that I’ve lived here for nine years, my entire adult life — I moved here literally the week after I graduated from college, and have never lived anywhere else since — and frankly a lot of shit has gone down in those nine years.

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The thing is, I love my life. But by that basically I mean I love my life with my boyfriend, where we spend time together talking and looking at birds and bouldering. We could talk to each other and look at birds literally anywhere in the world, and we’d still be just as happy to be together.

You might say, oh, but what about your community! Well. What about it. I know hundreds of people here, but I don’t have (m)any close friends.

Frankly it’s more often a problem, how many people I know here. One time my boyfriend and I went to the park, just wanting to sit under a tree and read books, but we had to move once because my elementary-school-rival-turned-man-who-hates-me-because-I-didn’t-side-with-him-in-a-group-house-conflict showed up, and then when we’d moved and found another place to read, my boyfriend’s ex showed up and sat down near us, and we just said fuck this and went home.

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I’ve wanted to leave Berkeley at least twice before. After the pandemic I moved away for two months and never started to feel even remotely ready to come back. My ex had to come fetch me from thousands of miles away, and in the Uber back to Berkeley from the airport I cried the whole time. How utterly fucking miserable to have to return to a place of so much pain.

Every street I go down has many memories, overlaid on one another. The map is thick with group houses and offices both past and present. Places I’ve been hurt, or people I loved have been hurt, or places I went with people who have since killed themselves, or places where I was happy but that happiness was later so thoroughly stamped out that the memory of it is pain.

A single grove of trees that I bike by almost every day has a memory of Covid lockdown trauma and a memory of crying during a breakup and a (good!) memory of an early date with my boyfriend and a memory of being stressed at work and a memory of a guy I slept with and then had a falling out with and never spoke to again.

Like, Jesus Christ, calm the fuck down. I don’t even spend very much time in that grove of trees!

What if I lived in literally any other city in the world, where the trees would just be fucking trees?