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Sunflower field late afternoon with hills

tree, broken, beauty, woman

Prose + Photos by July Westhale

tree, broken, beauty, woman
broken, tree, woman, beauty
beauty, tree, broken, woman
tree, woman, broken, beauty
fuck I didn’t want broken and woman in the same sentence
fuck I’m overthinking it

 

Many types of beauty are possible.

Full moon over city at night

Wait. Let me back up. 

The author among sunflowers

There were sunflowers.

No, even further.

I’ve left home. Even further than that.

 

Okay. I was a quiet and dreamy child.

Fleetwood Mac on the highest volume, a battered copy of Red Pony, laying on large surfaces of flat and broken earth, pretending to know what it felt like to not know what not feeling felt like. The etymology of pretending to be dead was first the live oak outside the perimeters of the trailer park that was my gateway to California. Both are gone now. The tree, killed by Dutch elm, and the park, killed by the cotton-turned-weed industry. 

The longest-enduring, and most memorably formative, was a field of sunflowers in between my hometown, Winters, and the Davis Arboretum. In Spanish, sunflowers are girasoles, which means sun-turners. What it also means is: shelter. a soft place to land.

Sixteen years after I moved out of the house at 16, I took my first round of close friends to see the almond orchards in bloom. We stopped for gas at the Yolo-Solano County line and there: hundreds of yellow, like small Post-It missives of what it used to feel like to want.

Side mirror, mountain, reflection of hand with ring

A few days before I moved to New York, I asked a man I barely knew, a man who’d asked me over a glass of sweating white wine why I was really here, to take me in his vintage Chevy pickup to my hometown. It was too early for sunflowers. We swam in the lake, we ate the stone fruit I used to wait all year to clean off myself. I took photos, mostly of the place where the peaks prompted government officials to build a dam and evict a whole township of people and about which I once wrote a novel.

Also of this man’s dog. More photos of the dog than the man himself.

Dog in old truck

No one, I think, had asked me why I was really here in too long.

The author with the dog

It was 74 days after I found out my partner had been having an affair for a year with their ex-girlfriend, 1,899 days after we got married at San Francisco City Hall on a Thursday before St. Patrick’s Day, 2,659 days after we went on our first date at the Cock-a-doodle Cafe, a dyke-owned brunch place that, like the trailer park, the oak tree, and the man who picked me up in his Chevy, isn’t around anymore. It was approximately 5,475 days after I moved to Santiago, Chile with only a St. Christopher’s pendant and a vague understanding of what my father looked like, and, give or take, 6,205 or so days since the first day I laid down in the sunflower field that never used to be near anything at all, least of all a marker for how to get someplace else. 

I don’t owe anyone an explanation, but something, something here about California, about how I can’t stop writing about it, about rot and barrenness and drought and blaze, about biting off more than is possible to fit in one’s mouth and also about never opening one’s mouth at all—

why it is that the idea of going home—

I’m sorry, I can’t. 

Selfie of the author

When I talk about being left for a model, I do so because it’s easy. It’s easy to have something to point to, to shoot at a target that is not my own want, which is always as humorously gigantic as being inside a cave of botanical wonderkind, watching them turn the sapphire blue and ruby red of sirens, the bright diamond of a floodlight.

I live in New York now.

When I arrived in New York, my friend Natalie dared me to make this one about Beauty:

Discarded trash bag with teddy bear on New York City sidewalk

This is why one has friends. And she’s right; I wanted to call it woman, but I’m always wanting what’s both easy and eviscerating, in equal measure. I won’t write about the trash bag, the prolific smattering of abandoned stuffed bears all over Brooklyn, nor the man biking past who didn’t even look. I won’t say that this is also a wedding photo, because I’m in New York now, where everyone gets it, and my hands can stay, heavy and ring-less, at my side. 

Damn. I didn’t make it about beauty after all. I’m sorry. 

This is also why one has friends.

Let me tell you a story about a stoop romance. Let me tell you about a Cancer begging a Capricorn to love her. Let me tell you about seeing an old bad friend, hoping, hoping. Let me tell you about the man with the pickup, how the night before I left, he drank four bottles of wine and smashed one on the ground. When I swept it up with a paperback and a stained record sleeve, he said you’re precious and you must have been through a lot of shit to put up with me. And I said, I’m not putting up with you and left a glass of water by his bed, and four Advil, a breakfast fit for a mother, and when I drove away I realized that my hands were bleeding, but that I was thinking I’ve never heard precious used as praise because you can’t teach an addict’s kid new tricks.

Couple on steps

Let me pretend I erased everything after stoop romance.

 

I live in New York now. 

I think about bread products every waking hour, I remember that my birthday will be leaves changing, not peak fire season, I get lost as a daily practice. 

Restaurant patio at night

My first week here, I met all of my friends’ friends. They are familiar with the alkalinity of East Coast wines, the persistent smell of summertime garbage, which is like gingivitis, and the breathtaking normalcy of divorce. 

Things they are unaware of:

My honeymoon was a five-week road trip through the Balkans. 

Even as a child I never believed I could hold everything I held good and dear in my cupped palms—it would leak light, and the light would stain. Or is that where the light gets in? 

My favorite day in the whole world was one where my former spouse and I woke up in a canyon in Croatia that held every draft of blue imaginable, and fell asleep after a dinner of Dalmatian prosciutto, children below our window playing in ruins on the beach and screaming the only English they knew: hasta la vista, which isn’t English but belongs to it now, and fuck my life.

 

My East Coast friends are, however, intimately aware of fireflies, which have a light that does not stain. Value the decency of neighborhood-anonymity. Are likely working in publishing, born into money, on the lam, or some combination thereof. 

Lying on the grass in a park and reading

New Yorkers talk to me every moment I allow them to. 

You can’t keep this city inside, they say. 

They say, we know the inside of a Don Delillo plot line after all this

They say you hafta go to Coney Island, as if they invented it. 

As a matter of gesture, they sweep their arms across the bar, the arch in Armory Park, the flooding G train, and the whole world, while they’re at it. 

 

The day I met a friend’s friend in the park with whom I was developing the feelings of large yellow flowers, a family of four played Boat in fully-inflated life rafts in the meadow at Prospect Park. I wrote another story where I pretended it happened in a school playground; it was easy and eviscerating, too. When I walked back home that night, deeply inhaling the smell of steamed trash and magnolias, I remembered it was the summer solstice. I remembered that once, 3,285 days before, I’d spent the summer solstice with my stepdad in Anchorage, apologizing for my queerness. The light was too permeating to sleep and I never begged for anything again. When he came to my wedding, he stood with his legs splayed in all the photos, slumped as sin. 

Sometimes I wake up at dawn in New York just so I can be in a world where my former spouse isn’t awake and in love with someone else. 

Sometimes I forget I ever had a spouse, a job I went into where I wore shoes that weren’t smoking loafers. Sometimes I forget that I cared a whole field, an optimized dam-peak’s worth, about truth. About being precious, and about putting up with. 

I won’t forget going to Coney Island for the first time. It was Saturday, this last one, and I had a head cold and was in a row with the friend’s friend, and the row was about liking each other too much. 

Still, I knew it was a fight of little consequence. For example, my hands were not full of glass, I was not driving a station wagon of my things anywhere at all, and when asked if I wanted to go on the Wonder Wheel, I said I’m terrified of heights but I endeavor never to remember that, and he’d nodded as if he’d said it himself. 

New Yorkers danced on the boardwalk because they really did invent Coney Island. 

From the top of the wheel, we saw this: 

Sky with plane and letters

Let me tell you a story wherein Wendy said yes. Let me tell you a story wherein Wendy said yes and did everything right but now hates Coney Island, Sans Serif fonts, and cumulus clouds. Let me tell you a story wherein Wendy never had a boyfriend, just a really good group of friends who sprang for her after a rotten week. Let me tell you a story in which Wendy sits at the highest point of a geography she doesn’t understand, and when she descends, she feels nothing but the kind and obliterating gesture of everything.

 

 

July WesthaleJuly Westhale is a novelist, translator, and the award-winning author of six books, including Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, and The Huffington Post, among others. She is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic.

Header photo by NadyaVetrova, courtesy Shutterstock.