Jan 23

Jan 23 Home Letters

Words and Images by Arley Weller Sakai

[December 4, 2021]

Here I am. (Where am I?) In the corner of the room, where everything started and happened and existed and fragmented. The room is no longer assigned purpose. After the carnage of what is now the past tense, the room is just a prefecture of dissociated objects. It’s as if I had everything to define the idea of a home and then stripped it away of all embodiment. In a green-tinged aura, I hardly feel safe anymore. The constant bustling of energy. The dread of silence.

[December 19, 2023]

I didn’t hear the rain for three years straight. I was scared to take baths or showers longer than seven minutes for fear of draining the meager reservoir. If I left the faucet running while brushing my teeth, we’d be building aqueducts siphoning from beyond the Nevada border next summer. It was an aquaphobic childhood. Now, during my two-week stay for my college winter break, the forecast predicts ceaseless rain.

A peaceful rhythm of water-wetting gravel and the wooden porch. Foreign sounds for this town. My friend and I go hiking at the river bottom despite the scheduled downpour. We dampen our heads and dirty our calves. Alien landscapes to seize, to make sense of their scents and foot feels. My friend understands this — she hikes barefoot. She feels the clay gush between her toes and quivers with satisfaction. We agree; this feels so Ojai. The kiss of rustication, the frayed hems of hemp pants grazing sagebrush, industrial clamor absorbed by endless oaks and sparrows singing.

We get lunch afterward, hungry and soaked. The increasingly unrecognizable faces at our favorite cafe feel less disparaging, knowing the menu as well as we do. Mud-caked and familiar as we are. We have to assure ourselves of our familiarity until it’s outwardly apparent. I order my second burrito from here within 24 hours, like I have something to prove. Afterwards, my friend drops me off at my mom’s new place, quaint but uninsulated. I feel bloated and tired and won’t talk for the rest of the day.

Now it’s late, and we’ve turned on a movie to make up for the quiet. We don’t share dinner. We don’t get quite warm enough. We don’t —

[December, xxxx]

I’m no better than my appetites. My appetites are symptomatic of my upbringing. My upbringing is inextricable from my hometown. My hometown is a fruit bowl, both geographically (the Topa Topa mountains cradling us like a woven basket, the occasional rainbow its majestic handle) and commercially. We export dark greens and tangerines. Fallen olives all over, their pits becoming gravel down our driveways. Margins filled with almond trees and vineyards. I’ve always lived close to an orange orchard. I used to live on an orange orchard. My body odor, marking the onset of puberty, masked by the thick drafts of orange blossoms and rotated mulch. My body kept growing upward, a hyper-sapling. It’s because of all those Pixies we bought by the bag. The citrus, its sugars, fueling growth until I could grab the sun-ripened orbs hidden at the top of the tree. Not that I ever actually did the labor of picking. And don’t forget that you didn’t do it either. No, we just eat and write and move and move and

[July 12, 2002] → Ventura → Ventura → Ojai → East End → Ojai → Ojai → Montecito → Ojai → Montecito → Ojai → Carpenteria → Ojai → Santa Barbara → Santa Barbara → Ojai → Ojai → Portland → West Hollywood → Ojai → Santa Barbara → Portland → Santa Barbara → Portland → Meiners Oaks →

[December 22, 2023]

Dear [My High School Employers],

Would you be proud to know I’ve made it out of the town you thought could cradle just as well as it could constrain? One of you told me once about how you got rejected from your dream college and how that served as a lesson in taking unfulfilled expectations as necessary opportunities for shifting our perspectives, which often demand too much of us. Well, I got into a college and am (to your and my own surprise) graduating next year, once the sun finally returns to that northern, gray city. I’m graduating with so much to look forward to, including the excitement of returning here, this microclimate. Coming back as a changed person. A smarter person. A more informed and caring individual. I am, I am, I am.

Haven’t I returned so successfully? Tall, well-talking, still tender to this town. And yet I can’t find you, boss. Where do you hide in the auto-generating crowds of faces I don’t know? I don’t know these beautiful people and their treated leather and good perfume. I call them trespassers. To them, I haven’t grown at all. They have no point of reference. They didn’t know me when I was under six feet and only ate fruit for breakfast. When I squeaked like a mouse, sexless, optimist. They don’t know who I’ve become to stand for. As.

Boss, I think anonymity for us locals is an unshakable type of ugliness. Thankfully, I’m so big.

It’s a damp morning. I get my coffee and look for you. I haunt your old house, which is pathetic—I know you already sold it while I was away. It saddens me to think we can’t return to each other like how we used to. I loved the idea of how you employed me because it was such an easy purpose to hold here. Now, I don’t know any of your whereabouts. What does that say about how I belong to this town?

Boss, I miss you. Tell me where you’re sleeping — it’ll help me feel a little bit more at home.

Warmly,

PS — I lied. I saw all of you a couple days ago at my former place of employment (yours?). I had to hunt you down. When I suggested dinner, it seemed impossible to secure a date. Don’t you want to see how I’ve changed? I have. Let me convince you we were worth the past lives we shared. I’m, I am.

[xxxx]

My retrospective thesis statement for a childhood in this town would be

the hundreds of trees I didn’t bother counting because I could see them all

from the bench on the cliff where so many confessions slipped out of me

and tumbled down into the valley like a geological event I would eventually

excavate. Four years later and I remember how soft fossils are. They are.

[December 26, 2023]

Tonight, we’re having the ladies over. It’s the first time we’ve shared this small, new house with others. You and I get tense about how much alcohol to buy. I thought adding another bottle to the cart was unreasonable. Now you’re upset with me because I’ve forgotten what it means to be a host.

It’s late afternoon. I put Margo Guryan on the speakers while you nap. I’m on cooking duty — using the same old dishes and putting them in an unfamiliar oven. There’s one overhead light in the kitchen that flickers irregularly. We’ll have to pretend it’s a party light.

Now the ladies are here, wearing green and gathering around all the crackers. We’re tiny dancing and drinking Pernod. We’re swapping different books written by the same person. We’re talking about our years and all the music we want to fill them. We’re swinging pendulums and pulling spirit animal cards. We’re going back for seconds.

I go to bed so drunk. The bed starts to feel like my own, even though it’s actually yours. But you’re in the next room over, already asleep. Before I go to sleep, I think about how home always changes for us. It hasn’t been the same wooden porch or hallway for more than a couple years in some time. I think we’ve become accustomed to finding comfort not in the consistency of the setting but in the process of readjustment. We do it so well, the readjusting.

[December 27th, xxxx]

Can’t tell if it’s the rain or the neighbor’s hedges rustling or the squirrels terrorizing the rooftops or the music we forgot to turn off last night or the washing machine leaking again, or the sparse notifications on my phones or the doorbell I rang when we used to know each other better, when your family home was something we shared, or if it’s the rain we’ve always prayed for to clear us from this drought or my pen scratching at the journal page because the ink cartridge is empty or if it’s both our voices doing the same thing, which is silence. I can’t tell, but you are still here in the room, and we’re both looking out the windows, wondering if it’s raining. Neither of us bothers to go outside because we know one of us will soon enough. It’s a Wednesday in December forever. I can’t tell if I’ve heard it before, but it sounds like a memory I used to repeat to myself. To convince myself I was home and not some trespasser. I am

PS —It’s our [xxxx] night together. We’re watching a movie, but not really, because I’m falling asleep. I hear you — you’re laughing at young Natalie Wood. You’re rubbing your shoulders, joking it’s always coldest sitting under the heater. I’m asleep but asking myself questions — when did this town get so wet? When did you last properly fill the fridge? When will I see you next? I don’t ask. Getting older means getting stronger, which means protecting yourself with self-assured acceptance. Protecting ourselves with presence.

We share a blanket that’s a little small for all my bigness. But you readjust the edges until it covers both toes, and we’re warm again. We are.