In the beginning we lived in California, where we got born and began to speak; where we became teenagers, heard music and took drugs; where we lost our virginities, played at studying English and fell in love.
In summer the weather was gorgeous. On balmy nights we found ourselves in a thousand marvelous places, pinwheeling across dancefloors and fluorescent rooftop pools, getting high in pitch-dark bedrooms and wandering stupefied through house parties, art galleries and sinister bars, and up and down the endless steel-and-chrome arteries of the freeways–and frequently we came to ourselves standing in the eye of the riot, dragging deeply from unfiltered cigarettes and drinking in the spaces, the faces, the bodies and the sounds, and thinking: This must be the place.
But the summer ended. We quit our jobs, left L.A., and moved to London. The days grew short, and the skies turned the color of cigarette ash. We stalked the halls of our flat, searching for something to search for. We were convinced: This must be the place.
But winter ended, then spring, and then London, too. We moved back to California, to Oakland, home. We grew up, cut our hair, got jobs, got apartments, got laptops, sat at our desks, hit reload, reload, reload.
We settled into rhythms. Mornings we watched the news: a child is missing; a car is on fire; an apartment building is sliding into the sea. Evenings we evaporated like water from a kettle forgotten on the range, every last drop rising and collecting on the ceiling, and then dripping drop by drop back into our beds. Weekends we drank.
In the intervals we rode the train back and forth between the two halves of our lives, going to work and coming home, and one night we fell asleep on the train and when we woke up a year had gone by. We’d been caught dreaming; summer had come and gone. Here we are, sitting on the train. Our station is coming around the bend. We see it through the window, and we think, Can this be it? Is this the place?
