diary of a californian

The wind brushed across her cheeks, tender. It fluttered her hair and made it stand upright, soft, as the sun caressed its fingers across her arm, both warm and compassionate.

The day felt hazy, perhaps magnified by the way her head lolled to the side in the field of green. Her vision was clear but her mind’s eye was half shut, only accepting sensory details like the tickle of the grass and the nipping of the breeze at her nose. 

She could hear voices behind where she lay, faint, calling her name. Her brothers, she was sure, who were much older but weren’t sick of home in the way she was. She liked to pretend, when she laid with her body pressed against the ground, that she was somewhere without palm trees and coastal weather and instead someplace out of her dreams, where trees turned orange in fall and it snowed and you didn’t have to drive 300 miles north to get deep into a forest. Played pretend that she was somewhere she didn’t feel trapped in some concrete jungle of metal skyscrapers and electronic billboards.

Something in the back of her mind nagged her, told her she was being unrealistic with her dreams. That she would miss the citrus trees hanging over the neighbor’s fences and the summer road trips to Death Valley. That she would miss smelling the sea salt from her bedroom window late at night, hearing the chittering of raccoons and the zip of ruby-throated hummingbirds in the summer. That she would regret all the choices she was considering making.

Enough. She breathed in deep, and let it out slowly until her lungs ached for air. And repeated, until her racing anxiety of the future quieted and it all fell away under the lull of the California sun.

The grass in her grandparents’ backyard was the one place where her visions were fueled, atop a hill where at a certain angle all she could see was the sky and the clouds that filled it. She greatly treasured the few weekends during the summer when she could be there for hours, alone, almost in a sort of trance. There it was easy to forget everything else existed, and she didn’t want to leave just yet.

“Mariana!” One of her brothers had wandered closer, sounding rather irked. “Come help set up for lunch, would you?”

She sighed, taking another calming breath before pushing herself up from her sanctuary, dirt finding its way beneath her nails and grass clinging to her shirt. The future hadn’t arrived yet, she had to remind herself. For now, she guessed she could wait a while longer.