Ghosts, Gold, Thunder, God

They say everyone in California dreams, but I came to California already in a dream. Wind blew me there. It was the hot, dry kind. The kind you have to go further south than San Francisco to find. I had no money, but I had talent, and there was a woman there I needed to talk to.

I wanted to find gold in California. Not the money kind, but the light kind. I wanted to find street lamps in the desert at dusk. I wanted gold to line the interstate and scrawl secrets in the night the way it did in my dreams. Gold glowing in the darkness is the closest thing to a muse I have ever known. You might not understand this, but I can’t talk about California without talking about gold.

But I don’t remember gold in California, I remember mostly blue. I found the woman I was looking for and we got a chance to talk, and a chance to cry, and a chance to watch the blue fog banks roll in and envelop us. I left a few years later. When I left, I wasn’t the same and I wasn’t broke and she wasn’t in California.

When people ask me about San Francisco I think of ghosts. I don’t talk about them, but I think about them. I was a ghost. Ghosts don’t walk in this world, they walk in their dreams. They’ve forgotten what it means to be present on this earth. San Francisco is full of dreamers, so it is full of ghosts. I will find ghosts in Chicago too, but I think they will be fewer, and I think they will be different. The way a place dreams changes everything.

I was born in Galesburg, Illinois at the tender age of 18. It is a strange process, being born as a young man. I progressed through my infancy while the green fields of rural Illinois stretched out to meet sunsets the likes of which I had never seen. I learned what thunder meant sitting on the porch of my friend’s rented house. On that specific night we didn’t drink Borovička, which tastes like a juniper fire lit with gasoline, but in my memories we did. You should never drink beer in a thunderstorm, that is why we drank Borovička.

Out there on the prairie was the closest I ever came to finding God.

In the midwest, trains smell different. The scent is oily. Galesburg had this smell when it warmed up. I smell it in Chicago too, but never anywhere else. It reminds me of a world that is small, and a world that I am small within. It is not the smell of places that change the world, it is the smell of places that anchor it. I prefer these places.

I came from Argentina to San Francisco, but within me a river in Argentina flows straight into Illinois and San Francisco is an oxbow. My personal history is not contiguous. Our histories rarely are. I remember Buenos Aires and Alejandra and poise and grace and Malbecs and cold dark nights on the altiplano. I remember self-pity and loneliness and trying to find meaning. I never found meaning in San Francisco. I’ve found meaning here.

When I walk the lakefront path in the first days of spring I don’t find myself looking at Lake Michigan, because water is not what I came here to see. I came to look at the fields of grass under a bright blue sky. I came to watch green roll out into the distance until it reaches God. Or thunderstorms. Whichever should come first.