Quad Light, Ocean Fog

California met me with its familiar theater of weather. On the old quad the light fell in clean rectangles between the arcades, and for a moment I was every age I had been there at once. Students crossed the lawn with the same purposeful drift. I did not belong to the place anymore, and that was a relief as much as a bruise. I walked without a destination, noticing how my black clothes looked like a quotation of someone else’s seriousness in all that sun.

In the city I went to City Lights out of old habit and stood among shelves that had once felt like a map of a possible self. The books I ended up writing were not the ones that younger woman would have predicted: Soviet machines, a space station, a Moldovan hospital, a Siberian signal, and now a plutonium city and the women history filed under someone else’s name. I bought nothing. I only wanted the smell of paper and the mild vertigo of realizing affection and estrangement can share a single afternoon.

Late in the day I drove to Ocean Beach and watched the fog erase the horizon line by line. The Pacific performed its endless rehearsal. I felt fond of the person who used to stand here drafting different futures, and foreign to her certainty. She had not yet learned how much of the work would be listening for absences. The wind was cold enough to justify the cardigan. I stayed until my hands hurt, then turned back toward the inland warmth, carrying the salt on my coat like a temporary visa.