California, rest in peace.

"The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way." - Joan Didion

The beers came with frosted mugs, lips rimmed with chili-salt like the little jars of Lucas seasoning I would buy from ice cream trucks in my Burbank grade school days. Two Coronas and a Modelo Especial while we waited for our street-style tacos in one of the booths on the more secluded side of the restaurant, where our suits drew a few less stares from the other customers. We had about an hour to kill before the wedding reception began a mile away at the Museum of Latin American Art, and while that meant drinks for the three of us while the sun was still up on a February day borrowed from summer, for me it meant guessing that tacos at an anonymous taqueria in Long Beach would be better than any I'd had in two years on the East Coast. And being right.

The Coronas were for two high school friends, one whom I've been fortunate enough to stay close with since, who has been with me in Poland and Pamplona, and far harder places in between, and another whom I've seen far less, but is still someone special in my life. I held her infant daughter a few hours before, remembering vividly us holding a ten-pound sack of flour wrapped in a baby blanket in high school, our shared responsibility during our week-long marriage for a Life Commitments class senior year. The last time I'd seen her I lived in Los Angeles, her adorable newborn just an abstract to daydream of with her soon-to-propose-boyfriend, and the couple the three of us had just seen become husband and wife was trying to make a long-distance relationship work against the odds of youth and yearning.

The ceremony was a further homecoming for me, bringing me back to the church I'd gone to growing up in North Hollywood, attached to the Catholic grade school I attended for my first 5 years in California, where I was classmates with the radiant bride. I graduated that school as an altar boy and returned an agnostic. Fifteen years removed from Sister Mary Bride's scoldings and after-mass breakfast specials at Ernie's Restaurant, I spent the sermon tracing the folded wood of the massive altar backdrop and the snaking concrete arches climbing to surround the bare cupola, thinking (characteristically) about myself and how my nine, ten, eleven, and twelve year-old eyes used to do the same half my lifetime ago. The difference now being comparison. Context. I didn't feel the awe that I did in St. Petersburg churches or Spanish cathedrals, but this actually wasn't all that bad of an effort. Something okay to leave, but never abandon. And here I was greeted with a kiss on the cheek from the collective crush of my entire high school class and a church-whispered "Welcome home" that felt more reassuring than any words that could come from the book on the pulpit.

I was at the reception for far too short of a time. Just long enough to eat, dance with the bride, cram into the rented photobooth with too many other people, and make sure my table was the rowdiest before heading up to Culver City to meet a random assortment of friends for an overdose of drinks. But it was enough for me to discover two things I could carry with me. One, that in a pinch, 2 parts Sprite and 1 part Coke can pass for ginger ale if you don't have the latter around as a mixer. And second, I got to see the bride's parents dance together, a couple that I only in that moment realized stood as perhaps the closest ideal of a marriage to look up to that I'd ever personally grown up around. I had certainly never seen my own parents in that way, and while Julienne's mother and father didn't raise me, they'd fed me enough over two decades to lay some hand in the claim. I also realized that though I loved them, both as real individuals and as an ideal in this moment, I didn't actually know for certain their first names. I'd grown up simply calling them by the Tagalog sign of respect, po. I decided not to ask, nor to go back and check the church program. Their actual names might be shared with other people I happen to know, but in my life that endearment would only ever apply to them.

As Julienne and Andy left for their honeymoon the day after, I recognized that mine was over. My life in New York is no longer the experiment of one's 20s; the box on the checklist has long been marked if I wanted to move on. Five months since my last visit and for the first time it was absolutely clear, not that I needed California, but how I needed it. It's a preservation of a fairy tale. A promise to myself that life could be easier if I wanted it to be- a ripchord to leave dangling for the rainiest of days. It's a lie obviously, one that I'm happy to tell myself because it's one of the very few I'll indulge. If I returned, it would be permanently. My life would become unavoidable, and in ways Californians don't realize, far more difficult than it is now. The Santa Ana winds are more blistering than the gush of displaced air that hits the subway platform eight seconds before the cars enter the station. Cramming onto the 6 train the few times I'm traveling at rush hour is much preferable to sitting in the parking lot that typically is the 405. In California everything is already so spread out. My move just pushed that circumference farther.

I returned to New York as late as possible Sunday night. Hours earlier during my twice-a-year game of beer pong we focused on the excitement of each turn rather than meaningful conversation. Because to do the latter would admit defeat, acknowledge too consciously the separation. No. I'm not coming back. And not that it isn't tempting, because it so clearly is. The Sunday barbecues with Pacific salt air and Mexican beers, the whispered welcome homes. It's an absolutely beautiful life. It just isn't mine. 

Still a half hour to go before the reception started. The television set in the corner of the taqueria was a satellite feed from Mexico of Azteca showing some human interest magazine, like a lower budget version of Dateline. It was muted, so all I could catch on my infrequent glances up were blurry-edged sepia tone re-enactments and the occasional on-screen graphic, chyrons in a semi-familiar language. But my intermediate Spanish was enough for me to easily translate their modest explanation of what would happen after the commercial break. Their one-word promise to be back. Regresamos. "We return." I understood it. I only hope everyone else can too.