How to begin to say goodbye to a temporary home? How to define it, file it away within your personal narrative? Berkeley was a microcosm of existence, the gleam of which would slowly fade from real life until the year became a boxed up, sealed, separate thing. Amid the tumult of those April weeks I sought moments to breathe the unique Berkeley smell the last few times. I wrote down songs on torn napkins, strange notes in my phone. Remember it, remember it, remember everything. I felt so alive in this shining place it was inconceivable that I should have ever to leave.
It was not the final goodbye: that would come three weeks later, messily, sobbing in the back of a rental car down Highway 1.
But it was goodbye to a way of life that would never be recreated, to a certain time and feeling and group of people: goodbye to iced coffee and walking to class in a sweet pine haze and basement hangouts and early coffee shop shifts, to gigs and bars and breweries, to dad dancing, and the strongest smell of spring I've ever known, and the same songs on repeat, and feeling it all, every aching second of it.
Between returning the sleeping bag that sunny morning, though, and the final 'proper' night in Berkeley when we climbed the Big C with beer to watch the sun set and the Bay glitter, there was work to be done.
The heaviest study workload of my life plays out against Berkeley's sweet late spring, the kind of season that assaults all five senses with its paradisal colour and heady scent. Daily life is a monotonous whirlwind of study, coffee, sun: there is paper after paper to write, and finals week looms uglily. Campus turns a delicate bright green. My head is consumed with revision.
I'm writing a paper on Springsteen's 1978 song Racing in the Street for my American music class. Greil Marcus, longtime music writer and my professor, invites me to his office to talk Bruce, which I do, and he asks me for a personal copy of my paper when it's done, and afterwards I walk down through North Side, head spinning, thinking how lucky I am to have found something I love without question, how all other life choices pale in comparison to this subtle art of talking about music, how crazy it is to get writing advice and encouragement from Greil, and then to step outside into California - California! - and walk under palm trees, and see the Bay glow ahead... all of it feels so right, and I'm determined to learn how to hold on to it.
Early one evening I change into a navy dress after an afternoon studying in the sun, and meet some friends down in the BART station. The sky is orange as we glide across the Bay into the city. In the Fillmore foyer are baskets of shiny red apples. I've heard things about these apples, and the legendary free posters after every Fillmore gig, and the chandeliers that dot the wide dark ceiling. We're here to see Laura Marling play: a most un-American gig, except that she lived in Los Angeles for a while and probably knows how it feels to interrupt Californian air with British tones. I forget how nice it is to hear those tones. I forget how quietly powerful her music is, and how much I listened to her in Bloomsbury in early 2015, hunting for cracks in the winter grey. And now I am at the Fillmore, San Francisco, California, USA, listening to this translucent figure with a guitar. I've swapped Bloomsbury for Berkeley, a London winter for Californian sun, quietness for happiness. Laura Marling reminds me of how things used to be, of an old self, of London, and of how damn good this year abroad has been to me.
we've been riding up mountains / turning corners in our lives
we would have taken any buses headed for Telluride
but we stopped in the desert in the middle of the night
and looked to the stars from the old roadsides
you looked at me and said / look at the moon, take it in, it will be gone soon
I'm taking more risks now / I'm stepping out of line
I put up my fists now until I get what's mine
One weekend the Summer of Love Festival comes to town. It's a hot day, one of the first. On Telegraph Avenue a long-haired band play from a camper van, and next to the poetry corner a funky wizard offers tarot readings. Later that day I do my American taxes and book a flight home to London in three months time, and feel conflicted about my identity. Suddenly all is tinged with finality.
In the evening we attend an outdoor sunset viewing of the Festival Express documentary. The sidewalk is warm on my bare legs, and there's Janis and The Band and The Flying Burrito Bros, and rock and roll is here to stay. Afterwards, I pack a year's worth of belongings to send back to London. It is satisfying to offload 20kg of winter layers just as the American summer begins, my possessions shrunk down to a backpack quantity I know I'll be sick of come August. As I fold clothes and wrap souvenirs I play The Band's version of I Shall Be Released: I see my light come shining / From the west down to the east...
Finals week strikes with bright perfect heat. It's May now, May 2017, the end-date I've written so many times on visa forms and school paperwork. We coffee-shop-hop in a last study scramble. On Tuesday, Greil Marcus emails with feedback on my Springsteen paper. He calls me a writer. We work outside at Elmwood's Cole Coffee, my friends and I, living off bagels and peanut butter pretzels and chocolate malt balls from the Safeway across the street. Sometimes we work from the benches in the temporary English department on campus - the professors moan it's a tin shed compared to Wheeler Hall, which is unluckily being renovated the whole time I'm studying English at Berkeley - but I kind of like the tin shed, with its purple doors and yellow windowsills and stainless steel, its daisied grass and poppies.
Walking home one evening, C and I talk about how everything seems beautiful again now it's hot and our departure is imminent. A year is a strange amount of time to be displaced somewhere new, we decide, because a year is so short in the context of our life, yet still a substantial amount of time, and yeah, we go home and eat and shower and write.
I finish an English paper in a single day, first at Cole Coffee, and later when the heat drops a little, on my bottom bunk bed. I lie on my stomach in my bra, typing words about the American landscapes of Flannery O'Connor. The blue sky deepens outside. The fan whirs. I stop writing and try to hold the moment. That night, after submitting the paper, I watch American Honey and begin a love affair with Mazzy Star's Fade Into You, a song that exactly fits my sunset-tinged life here.
All my final exams, nine hours worth, happen in one head-blurred rush on Thursday. For the last exam, American music, I write about Bob Dylan's Masters of War, which kind of sums up the way Berkeley life feels like a constant exam and a constant holiday at the same time. Then I step out of the emptying lecture hall into a cloudy day. I feel surreal: my academic life at Berkeley is over, and somehow I only have a handful of days left of this dreamy California existence.
we've not got long you know
to bask in the afterglow
once it's gone it's gone
we've been riding up mountains / turning corners in our lives
we would have taken any buses headed for Telluride
but we stopped in the desert in the middle of the night
and looked to the stars from the old roadsides
you looked at me and said / look at the moon, take it in, it will be gone soon
I'm taking more risks now / I'm stepping out of line
I put up my fists now until I get what's mine
One weekend the Summer of Love Festival comes to town. It's a hot day, one of the first. On Telegraph Avenue a long-haired band play from a camper van, and next to the poetry corner a funky wizard offers tarot readings. Later that day I do my American taxes and book a flight home to London in three months time, and feel conflicted about my identity. Suddenly all is tinged with finality.
In the evening we attend an outdoor sunset viewing of the Festival Express documentary. The sidewalk is warm on my bare legs, and there's Janis and The Band and The Flying Burrito Bros, and rock and roll is here to stay. Afterwards, I pack a year's worth of belongings to send back to London. It is satisfying to offload 20kg of winter layers just as the American summer begins, my possessions shrunk down to a backpack quantity I know I'll be sick of come August. As I fold clothes and wrap souvenirs I play The Band's version of I Shall Be Released: I see my light come shining / From the west down to the east...
Finals week strikes with bright perfect heat. It's May now, May 2017, the end-date I've written so many times on visa forms and school paperwork. We coffee-shop-hop in a last study scramble. On Tuesday, Greil Marcus emails with feedback on my Springsteen paper. He calls me a writer. We work outside at Elmwood's Cole Coffee, my friends and I, living off bagels and peanut butter pretzels and chocolate malt balls from the Safeway across the street. Sometimes we work from the benches in the temporary English department on campus - the professors moan it's a tin shed compared to Wheeler Hall, which is unluckily being renovated the whole time I'm studying English at Berkeley - but I kind of like the tin shed, with its purple doors and yellow windowsills and stainless steel, its daisied grass and poppies.
Walking home one evening, C and I talk about how everything seems beautiful again now it's hot and our departure is imminent. A year is a strange amount of time to be displaced somewhere new, we decide, because a year is so short in the context of our life, yet still a substantial amount of time, and yeah, we go home and eat and shower and write.
I finish an English paper in a single day, first at Cole Coffee, and later when the heat drops a little, on my bottom bunk bed. I lie on my stomach in my bra, typing words about the American landscapes of Flannery O'Connor. The blue sky deepens outside. The fan whirs. I stop writing and try to hold the moment. That night, after submitting the paper, I watch American Honey and begin a love affair with Mazzy Star's Fade Into You, a song that exactly fits my sunset-tinged life here.
All my final exams, nine hours worth, happen in one head-blurred rush on Thursday. For the last exam, American music, I write about Bob Dylan's Masters of War, which kind of sums up the way Berkeley life feels like a constant exam and a constant holiday at the same time. Then I step out of the emptying lecture hall into a cloudy day. I feel surreal: my academic life at Berkeley is over, and somehow I only have a handful of days left of this dreamy California existence.
we've not got long you know
to bask in the afterglow
once it's gone it's gone
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