California sunglasses

I was halfway up Broadway when I realised my sunglasses weren't on my head, nor were they in my bag. I’d already been walking twenty minutes but I turned back for the bar. I had no choice: they'd become my ‘California sunglasses', bought for $2.99 in Berkeley back in February and worn almost every day since. I was hopelessly attached. 

The evening sun was pure and lucent in the way that only the financial district on a Sunday can be: light draped across stately buildings, stone tinged pink, windows rutilant in the sky’s blue wash. Back at the bar - an upmarket faux-Irish watering hole on Water St, the kind of place that bursts with bankers and brokers at 5pm on a weekday - the floor's sawdust was scuffed to the sides, a folk band playing where we'd sat. None of the bartenders could find the glasses, and yet I'd been so sure, in the perfect light, that I’d retrieve them. 

The loss threw me abruptly out of sorts: I had to gape back tears: and I am not sure why, exactly, except that I'd worn the sunglasses almost every day that year. Peeling at the nose, lenses smudged, but you could spot them in nearly every photograph of me, from Berkeley to Vancouver to Nevada to New York. Instead of a final evening pleasantly drifting through the city sun, I marched back up Broadway for a replacement pair. The next morning I would begin a month’s bleached travels west and south, and I couldn't be without sunglasses. 

All the evening’s hours had slipped away, and there was nothing in the grocery store I felt like eating, and I was grumpy about the unexpected loss.

Yet it wasn’t the glasses or the money, exactly, that I cared about, but the severing of another tie to Berkeley. To lose the sunglasses was to make physical the loss of Berkeley in my life. And it also articulated something I hadn’t been completely aware of until this final evening: how emotionally tough I was finding it to leave New York. Aftershocks from leaving Berkeley, maybe, but I’d been so damn content in this east coast city. Leaving wasn’t easing the heaving in my vines. 

And in leaving places that I loved, in losing two cities, lovely ones, I was beginning to realise that tiny choices I made now might have greater, often unpredictable consequences. Consequences so beyond my control, in fact, that they probably deserved about as much concern as a pair of cheap and wayward sunglasses.