California
Suggested by: Reddit friend
Traveled: May 7 – May 15

Reading East of Eden has felt personal from the first page. I guess most fiction feels personal, a genuine relationship we get to have with minds and lives otherwise unreachable. But now deep in the reflection phase of my own move to northern California, a transition that has been stranger and much more difficult than the “You will love San Francisco“ assurances I came armed with, the stories of Eden echo moments I have almost daily. Is this shocking? Not really. The entire book is a retelling of Genesis, and far be it from me to exclude myself from the stories and patterns of the entire, collective human race. Seeing my story in East of Eden is inescapable. But still, my dust feels absolutely to be Steinbeck’s dust, the stretches of rainless sun and waves of long grasses of the Hamilton ranch must be the same that tickle these new vistas of mine. And the choices, the wrestling within oneself, the biggest fight of all for identity and absolution. Why, those are mine! The very same!!

California is home and it’s not home. It’s familiar, but with different shadows, different window dressings of desert scruff and palm fronds. The air tastes dustier than it should, and the sun is at the wrong angle. Yet it’s home. There are patios, and mothers that fill my glass before I can get up, and families gathered in rooms with clocks on the walls and jars of something colorful and pickled on the counters. People still do people-things here. They go to work and love each other. They lose touch with friends and take showers at the end of long days. I feel at home in the people. They remind me that the hills and dollhouse doors and palm trunks are just different props in their stories and sins and victories.

So yes, I am Adam Trask, and he is me, and we both came here on the promise of perfection. We came seeing a world that was born and will die in our heads. The reality is muddier. It’s harder. It is a profound feeling to realize that you don’t belong in paradise. Wherever it is, it’s not here. It can’t be. Lives are being lived here. And lives, in all their shallow soils and young loves, in their valley storms and pin-pricked mists, are too rich, too tangled, to be lived in the emptiness of Eden. We have lives to live and terrible mistakes to make. And it’s immensely comforting to know that we’ll stumble through together, even if the seasons change differently and the sky is the wrong shade of blue.