I woke to the clatter between wind and word, the light not rising but blooming— soft as breath caught on the edge of deciding.
A crow passes overhead without shadow. A stone turnes itself over in the stream and begins again.
Time is not a clock, but a fern, unfurling its memory with no urgency, no apology.
I am decades lived, six so far— and still the grass kneels under my step, still the world tries to tell me something in the flick of a yes, in the flash before thunder.
A spider repairs her web between the ribs of a gate. The air tastes of iron and oranges.
It is more than enough to have arrived, to still be arriving.
They laugh when I say I like it here— like I’ve confused heat with holiness.
But there’s something about a place that doesn’t lie. The Valley never pretends. It just spreads itself— wide, cracked, sweating— beneath a sky that doesn’t give a damn.
It’s in the way the sun leaks down the liquor store wall at 6:42 p.m., in the power lines holding hands across boulevards.
Out here, no one chases dreams. They work beside them. The dreams drive for Instacart. They sell roofing. They play synth in a band still deciding what to call itself.
God lives in the hum of a laundromat on Tuesday afternoons. No one notices.
Keep your oceans. The Valley doesn’t need a view. It is one— burned and aching and alive. All blister and bloom.
