Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash
Laptop light reflected the stock image of a woman wearing a necklace identical to the one I was wearing. My ex-boyfriend had given it to me in front of all my friends: an offering after another argument. He said it was custom-made, one-of-a-kind. He said he had designed it himself specifically for me. The woman’s lips seemed to smirk, whispering “He’s a liar.”
I sold it for 160 dollars. An appraisal of the other necklace and earring set he gave me revealed they were worthless, so I threw them into the East River, turning away before the small box hit the water. The books he gave me were donated to The Strand. Any photo with him in it was deleted. The cashier at Buffalo Exchange took two of the sweaters and said the Goodwill on the corner could take the rest of my used things. She didn’t laugh when I asked if they took used bodies.
With the cash from the clothes I bought an eggplant parmesan sub from Milanos. Red sauce dripped onto the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as I sat and ate. Four days after moving to New York in the winter of 2018, I had walked up these steps and wandered into a David Hockney exhibit. Smooth-faced people posed importantly or reclined in armchairs by swimming pools, framed in paintings like TV screens with the mute button turned on. Hockney’s California tugged at me, a world somewhere high above the grey skyscrapers that surrounded me.
I met him a month later. Life in the city until then had been sitting alone in cafes, sitting alone in Central Park, sitting alone in different churches. It was hard to imagine a New York separate from the frigid January days that seemed to end at four in the afternoon. He was from Los Angeles and, like Hockney’s paintings, he belonged to that floating pink world out of my reach. He drew me in with vivid stories of traveling the world as a professional surfer, performing with rocks bands, starting his own company, surviving run-ins with sharks and catching giant waves in hurricanes. He was starring in and producing his own documentary.
And he was in love with me.
Breaking through the clouds, I took in California for the first time framed by my airplane window. Mountains cradled a fiery sky that spread over flickering embers of house, car and street lights.
A similar shade of golden light caught specks of dust the next morning, when I drifted, dazed, into his family’s kitchen. I sipped bitter coffee as he loaded his longboard into the truck, then climbed into the passenger seat, the leather warm against the back of my thighs. While he surfed I walked, the cold Pacific’s seawater sending shocks up through my legs. That evening patches of red and peeling skin covered my body. A bonfire lit up his backyard and he told me how beautiful my eyes looked, reflecting the flame. Smoke hung heavy in my hair for hours after, his fingers tangled in the spirals.
He insisted on teaching me how to surf. I could barely lift the board. One end jammed into my arm-pit, my fingers slipping to grip the other, I accidentally bumped the board into a telephone pole as we approached the beach — CLANG. I was taken aback by how genuinely angry this made him, how quickly his demeanor shifted. Months later he would tell me “I wear a mask all the time.”
A weekend trip to Mexico left me with terrible food poisoning. Ten pounds lighter, I sat in the passenger seat as we drove north through desert and along cliffs. I’d drift in and out of sleep, lightheaded, watching the birds plunging and rising above the surf, feeling I was one of them. We stopped and I picked raspberries from bushes. I laid my hand on a redwood tree for the first time, and breathed in the ancient scent. Young redwoods can be killed by fire, but the longer they mature, the thicker their bark gets and the more fire-resistant they become. The blanket of shade pulled back as we drove away from the forest, exposing me to the afternoon heat. I turned up the air-conditioning, feeling carsick.
Lying on my back, I turned over handfuls of sand in my palms, turning over and over in my mind a question I had wanted to ask his mom. The night I met my ex-boyfriend, he recounted the story of a life-threatening accident that placed him in the hospital and rehab for close to a year. Thirty minutes into meeting him and I was already convinced he was a hero. But the more I entered his life, the more elements of that story shifted — no, it wasn’t a whole year. No, it hadn’t really been nerve damage. Sitting with his mother in the living room, I had wanted to ask her how she reacted to hearing the news, what it was like getting him healthy again, but something held me back. A feeling that she might not know what I was talking about —
Cold drops of water scattered across my body. I screamed and laughed; out from the ocean, he had dropped down on all fours and started shaking his salt water-heavy hair. With the sun directly behind him, beams of light ricocheted off his glistening skin. He was the center of my world. The documentary wasn’t mentioned again and the time he had spent in different countries fluctuated from months to weeks in his retellings. I didn’t question his story about having a thick accent growing up, even though all of his family members spoke English perfectly. The gaps and contradictions seemed to matter less in California, in this land where you never really had to get dressed, sprinklers were the only alarm clock, and the fish on the grill was freshly caught.
In July, I drove seven hours north from LA to pick him up in Yosemite. Flashes of green landscape alternated with the charred remains of recent forest fires. Ascending the curving roads into the park, it grew increasingly difficult to see outside the car widow. The smoke smelled like pine needles and falling leaves and something cooking; breathing it made me dizzy.
I hadn’t seen him in a month, but I had written to him in a journal every single day. Reunited, I handed it to him. He thanked me and set it aside. I watched it fall to the floor of the car, wedged between an empty Gatorade bottle and a crumpled Taco Bell bag. “I think I want to marry you,” he said. I smiled, eyes watering from the smoke.
Back in New York, back down on earth, I kept pretending to believe him. “I bought us tickets to La Bohème!” I thanked him, knowing we would never see it. “I’m going fly-fishing in Nepal!” I celebrated with him, knowing he’d never go. My questions were met with panic or anger. “You are all I have,” he would remind me. I would leave his apartment downtown late at night and wander around the city, needing the stiffness in my legs, the reminder that at least this ground was solid.
“I’m sorry for the times I’ve gotten angry with you,” he texted me.
In April I bumped into a mound of ataulfo mangoes in the Whole Foods near my office — the first ones of the season. I would buy them three at a time, store them in my desk drawers and let the bright scent escape whenever I reached for a pen or paper clip. Soon it was warm enough to go outside without a jacket on. I walked to Bryant Park on my lunch break and grabbed a rusty chair from one of the tables, turning it towards the sun. Sitting, I lifted my chin, imagining freckles gradually popping up on my forehead, my nose, under the tears rolling down my cheeks.
One night at his apartment, he lost his temper after staining his sports jersey. He snapped at me when I offered to clean it then yelled at me when I offered to pay to have it dry cleaned — I don’t want your money!” — eventually taking it. I walked up to his living room window and gazed out at the setting sun. On our first date, deep into the conversation where I found myself telling him things I’ve never told a man before, I said “I’ve watched men drain the life out of women I love.” He had looked at me with such compassion — but had that been real? I pressed my forehead hard against the window-pane, imagining how I’d plunge forward if it wasn’t there. When people jump from burning buildings to their deaths, they aren’t trying to kill themselves. They are just trying to escape the flames.
“You’re so young,” he said to me, near the end. I nodded, pretending to agree, aged, exhausted.
California lost 1,963,101 acres of land to fire in 2018. I wonder: when residents smelled the smoke, did they flee? Or did they stay, knowing the fire blazed towards them? Residents of Paradise, California — a town completely destroyed by fire — believed they weren’t adequately warned. At a public hearing, their Sheriff Kory L. Honea said,
“I understand it was absolutely chaotic. I will probably never be able to give you an answer that satisfies you.”
L.L. Constance is the Editorial Producer at ADDitude Magazine in Manhattan, New York. She writes and reports on mental illness and learning disabilities.