At a certain age, I became annoyed with all the songs about California. I was at the point where one could observe but not empathize, and I used this state of mind to be cynical. There was nothing mythical to me about the state I’d been born in. The suburbs I was driven home in, the trails I hiked with classmates, and the sunsets I took blurry pictures of, all seemed painfully mundane. One of my first obsessions, Lana Del Rey, told her lover to “come down to California, be a freak like me.” I liked the song, but I never sang along to it, finding myself disappointed with all the non-freaky cracked sidewalks that surrounded me in every direction.

Of course, there is a certain quality to California. My mother was born in Pennsylvania, and my dad grew up in Utah. They both decided to move here because years after all the gold was found, California still represents opportunity. I don’t mean that in a patriotic sense, but in an aesthetic one. California seems like the perfect place for any dream, as long as you’ve never been. It’s a state that morphs into whatever you want it to be. My parents wanted to leave behind their former selves and start a family. They more or less succeeded. 

What they didn’t count on was me, the kid, not sharing California's morphing quality. I’ve barely altered my appearance—the lowest bar for change. I dress, and have dressed, in a rotating series of sweatshirts and pants, not unlike a cartoon character. Admittedly, I dyed my hair blonde last year, and cut it shorter. For a few years before that, my hair was Ariel red. Then before that, I had blue tips which faded almost instantly. You could maybe divide my life into the different eras of hair, but they did not signify reinvention, merely a desire for it. 

Only during the pandemic, with so much time spent with my body, just existing inside it, have I realized how steadfast I am in my ways. There are tics I do, mindless habits, that have stuck with me for years. I never leave the house without lip balm, and if I go too long without reapplying, my brain tells me my lips are on fire. It’s always a particular flavor of lip balm too. Peppermint, and only peppermint. Certain foods, like peanut butter, were shut out by my stomach years ago and never eaten since. I periodically brush my hair, and focus on its little imperfections. The parts where it’s thinner than others, the way it sticks out in the back. 

Not that long ago, I told my mom I wished I had an at-home stylist. “One that would wake up when I woke up, do my hair and makeup, cover up my acne, and then I wouldn’t have to stress about it every morning.” 

My mom asked me why I thought I couldn’t do my makeup, to which I said, “It just looks so bad every time I try. Either it doesn’t match my skin, or clumps up then fades away.” I resented my skin for not being marketable, and myself for not knowing how to change it. 

“You’re making me sad,” was her reply.  

I don’t exactly feel unknown to my parents, more distorted. They’ve seen me grow up, and remember parts of my life that I never will. But when we talk, there is always some paper between us, or some stained glass, or something else that transforms our familiar shapes into foreign ones. I tell my mom that I don’t want to be called beautiful every time I have an insecurity. I tell her that I appreciate the gesture, but for someone who’s self-loathed for so long, it does nothing. She insists I’m beautiful, and adds a profanity this time. The conversation isn’t cruel but it is garbled, lost to the radio waves. I try to remedy this and just come off blunt, uncaring. 

My mom was an exceptionally beautiful teenager. I can’t talk to her mom, dad, or brother about it—they’re all dead now. Taken by the same disease, too. Maybe I could talk to her stepmom about it, but she’s a fairytale villain made of flesh, and I’m sure she’d just say something menacing. My dad has a story of visiting her, and seeing the walls of her home smothered in guns. The one person who can testify is Pam, mom’s old childhood friend. Four years ago, Pam decided she was going to stay a full week at our house. April was about to begin. I’d never met Pam before, only heard anecdotes.

I remember my dad not being happy about it. “We don’t even let family stay that long,” he argued. He was right. We are not a hospitable family—for the most part we’re three loners and two cats, all of whom hate intrusions. This was of no concern to Pam. She arrived a week later.

Pam was tall, with tan-brown hair that she kept in two ponytails. We put a mattress in the office for her to sleep in, but I’m not sure I ever saw her lie down. Pam prided herself on being unignorable. She would bellow, tell stories that bled into proclamations. You got the feeling she just wanted to hear herself talk. “I got married for a minute. Well, fourteen months. I’d consider that a minute. That’s the thing about people, you have to let it go. If they say the chip bag—this chip bag—is red, you can’t argue. You can go on and on saying the chip bag is really green, and that may be the truth, but it won’t matter. That’s just how people are.”

A few days into her visit, Pam paid for a two day stay in a hotel about an hour away. Why, I don’t know, but I suspect dad had laid down an ultimatum. Pam soon announced we would be coming to the hotel room with her. Mom would later tell me that this moment, when Pam talked over me trying to politely decline, was the closest she ever came to yelling. We wen anyway. I sat on the carpet while Pam put an episode of Friends on the hotel room TV. The first and last time I would ever watch Friends. It was midday, and she kept going out on the balcony to smoke.

“I was so jealous of your mom,” she admitted after coming back in for the third time. A canned laugh track punctuating her every sentence. “When we first met, she was this blue eyed, brown haired beauty. She got all the boys.” My mom did her best polite laugh. I’ve seen photographs of my mom when she was younger, but they’re all in black and white, or sepia tones. I have to add the color myself.

There was one insight Pam gave me, a perspective only she could offer. “I want you to picture this,” she said. Crouching to be on eye level with me, the hunched-over middle schooler. “Your mother, your poor mother, she’s just lost her mom. She doesn’t get why yet, she doesn’t know what cancer is. She’s eleven years old, for fuck’s sake. Then this new woman appears. This woman, she’s spiteful towards your mother in ways she’ll never understand. Mina, that’s her name, she tells your mom that they’re not paying for her college.”

Mom offered a nod. Pam continued. “All the time Mina has, she lavishes on your mother’s new stepbrother. When your mother comes home with a C on her report card, or a boy at school who’s bothering her? Nothing. Her dad sometimes pulls her aside, tells her he loves her. That he fucking loves her. And your mother doesn’t understand, cause she’s a kid. Jesus. Sarah—don’t you ever smoke.”

The pure truth of my mother’s childhood may have remained unknown to me, if not for her. But her mouth made it impure, turned neglect into a campfire tale. We didn’t stay in the hotel room for long. Only a few hours. Pam left town soon after, promising to write and that she’d had the best time. She hasn’t been back since, and she hasn’t written. My mom doesn’t return her calls. Once in a blue moon she shows me the phone, Pam’s number on the screen, and we giggle as we watch the call go to voicemail. 

It’s only recently that I’ve learned how much baggage my parents carry. How they’ve changed their lives according to me, how they’ve made room for a child in ways I don’t think I’m capable of. My therapist says what my parents carry is a thing they pass on to me—that as I learn more about their nightmares, I am also learning more about myself. It’s a simple realization, but one that helps me navigate the layers of misunderstanding. I suppose they must feel distorted in my eyes as well. Two faulty radio stations exchanging static.

According to my dad, at a certain point I became withdrawn. I used to go out in the backyard shed, I used to sing, I used to write, and I used to talk. Now I just stay in my room, he says. Put on headphones and listen to music he’ll never hear. I’ll never experience real life this way. If I react too deadpan, or don’t say thank you quick enough, this is proof. I don’t know how to say that when I yell, I feel like him. My most default instinct is to do what parents would have done. Yet my family is full of secrets–grudges kept for years, stare-offs in crowded rooms. When I close myself off to avoid influence, that too feels like part of an ancestral tradition. 

There’s a song by Fall Out Boy that I really like, called Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet. My dad loathes the band, which is maybe why I like them so much. The chorus of the song goes: “But I will never end up like him / Behind my back I already am.” The line is sung in their signature overwrought style, a million string quartets to back up the epiphany. I think of it every time heat rises in my throat. As someone who has resisted change for so long, I should know better than to complain. My anger should not be a physical thing, a lead pencil lodged in my lungs, and yet it is.

Decades ago, my dad lived in New York. He describes his personality then as very meek. It is difficult for me to picture my dad scared. This was when he used to smoke, used to be crushed between rain-soaked city walls. He was an aspiring artist, with little to no money. There wasn’t much to do when you were poor in New York, my dad explained. Food cost money. Going places cost money. Walking around could turn dangerous. So he would sit in his apartment, and call well-known artists that also lived in New York. Thumbing his way through the yellow pages until it was dark again. 

His questions were not original, but earnest. He called an experimental artist that he admired, one whose name he’s never told me. “What’s the secret to being a successful artist?” he asked. I’ve never seen his New York apartment, so I picture an empty room, with one rotary phone in the center.

“You must kill your parents,” said the artist in return. 

My dad has told me this story many times, and each time he emphasizes that I should do the same. “Kill me,” he says. With a bloodless laugh. “Stop caring what I think. Leave the house, spread your wings, all that.” I wonder how I can ignore what my parents think, and still exist with them. How I can eat dinner with my mom, and become avant garde, a fearless explorer. There is still much fear in me. 

Sometimes I want to protest that I’m not a shut-in at heart. Before the pandemic hit, I used to walk around Lake Anza pretty often. At least a couple times each year. Occasionally with friends, other times with parents. Lake Anza isn’t really a lake—instead a reservoir, created so Berkeley could have another beach and hiking trail. I didn’t know that when I was eight. I would climb down from the outcroppings, onto slippery rocks. Inhale fresh gulps of yellow grass and eucalyptus trees. Peel off the bark myself, then toss it to the side once I got bored. During the fall, the entire area would be painted in shades of beige. In spring it was all blooms, all frog green poison oak I would wash out of my clothes.

How I entertained myself, and, I thought, others, would be by telling stories. Secondhand ones - I could never conjure a tale out of thin air. Though I write lots of fiction now, this is still half-true. I cannot build emotional truths from blank pages, I cannot write stories with morals. One time, while we were venturing down to look at a graffiti covered oak tree, I told the story of the headless horseman. I forget the time of day, who I was telling it to, and the age I was, but I remember the way I butchered it. The key to a headless horseman story is the twist, after all. You must build up how in love Ichadbod is with Katrina, and how willing his mind is to go any direction the heart tells it. There must be utter severity when the legend of the horseman is conveyed, and you must make every fictional tree in the dark forest Ichabod rides through taller than tall. You must make Brom evil, but casually so. I know these things now. 

The real mark of change here though, is not how I tell stories but something more physical. There is a miniscule island in Lake Anza. When I hiked the first few times, this island was little more than a few clumps of mud and a tree about to fall over itself. The whole thing was maybe six feet away from shore. I didn’t dare try to visit—it would require getting my socks wet, and the water was always an opaque greenish brown. Like when you’re five and you want to mix all the paint colors together, only to be disappointed when it all becomes a dull sludge.

More recently, the island has become a peninsula. The water recedes, revealing a mostly dry chunk of land, littered with sharp rocks and clumps of ferns. I can walk across it now, with only a few puddles to worry about. Not long after it formed, I went there with my great aunt Amy. She mainly wanted to take pictures, as I tried to explain what she was standing on had not been there before. That what seemed so solid, so constant, was nothing more than a layer of dirt. It was impossible: I cannot make this new land fade, and I cannot make the old anything more than forgotten. 

It’s a muffled feeling, looking at pictures of my story-butchering younger self. The girl who couldn’t imagine a world where California’s everyday pleasures would be out of reach. There’s one photo where I’m lying on the couch, one hand reached out to pet my then-alive cat, Maddie. I’m wearing an Amy Shark sweatshirt and it’s bunching up. I like that one. My skin was clear and my hair was freshly dyed red, so the color is almost cartoonishly bright. I know that this is not a photo I would’ve taken myself. Over the years I’ve tried to document my appearance as little as possible, substituted presence for more comfortable anonymity. I have always had the dream of eclipsing my body, and leaving it behind. I wish I’d known this dream would stifle me - make me look in the mirror and not recognize myself. Treat my flesh with utter disdain.

My dad reminds me of photos like that whenever I resist my picture being taken. “You know, it’s possible, that one day, you will look back on photos of yourself, and not hate them,” he says, voice dripping with sarcasm. He has been doing photography for years, and part of me wants to trust his experience. When my mom tells me it’s going to be okay, part of me wants to believe. It’s just that all their experiences are so bleak. To venture into my parents’ pasts is to ready myself for the grim, the unrelenting dark. We are bound by facial features and tragic stories, but our closeness makes us volatile. Perhaps to ‘kill my parents’ is not a concept as arcane as not caring, but as radical as moving past them. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.