On a Wednesday night at the hotel in Kyoto, an old woman approaches me in the public onsen and sings to me with sweetness in her voice.
She asks where I’m from.
“The U.S.,” I tell her.
She leans in, encouraging me to elaborate.
“California.”
“Oh, my. California!”
Her pupils enlarge, and her kind eyes invite me into a home full of warmth and acceptance.
“California dreamin’ on such a winter’s day,” she whispers in a perfect melody.
Her eyes stay focused on mine, her cracked lips melting into a smile. In the communal bath we’re sharing together, our bodies are covered only by the milky liquid that surrounds us. In my rawest form, as the heat engulfs my bare skin, a tear rolls softly down my cheek. She doesn’t know the reason for my crying, but the tiny part of me that believes in something bigger thinks she was sent to me somehow.
A week before my 23rd birthday I took a solo trip from Paris to Brussels and encountered two young women in the plaza serenading each other with the same 1960s song. It tore me to my pieces then—and my heart still tries to claw its way out of my chest when I hear it now. I found it ironic at the time: that my escape from home would be met with constant reminders of its existence. Throughout my year in Paris, friends lovingly poked fun at my decision—mocking me for choosing a gray winter over near-constant sunny skies. To them, California was an illusory dream—and sadness there was untouchable.
This feeling of delusion inspired a piece I wrote about my best friend’s suicide attempt, and about the conversation she had with me while the sun set over the Pacific. “It’s impossible to be sad in California” is a refrain I repeat often in the essay. People dream of dinners eaten along the shore, of their melancholy drifting away in the waves, and yet there we were, staring directly into the darkest moment of her life.
This piece was the first one of mine that was ever accepted into a literary journal. As someone with the lifelong dream of being a writer, the feeling behind that accomplishment is almost incomprehensible. The piece captures helplessness, watching someone you love sink into the abyss, the vision of their hand slipping through yours. It captures repeated grief, tells the stories of people I’ve lost, and the anxiety of losing again. I yearn to tell her about the piece, how its imminent publication makes me feel like “a real writer now,” the dream she has always unconditionally supported. My “biggest cheerleader,” I call her, she taught me what it means to love. She came to see me off at the airport when I abandoned the California dream and moved to Paris. She sat next to my parents in the bleachers as I shifted my tassel and received my degree. She ran through the streets in celebration with me, even with her own delayed college graduation, brought on by sudden psychiatric leave. She put on a smile when life felt too painful.
Guilt sinks its teeth into my neck and forms a bloody scar, so I try to leave it all behind in the Japanese onsen.
“If I didn’t tell her, I could leave today,” the singing woman continues and I place my hand over my heart. The heat from the steam consumes me, incinerating everything in its path, and I brush the water along my forearm and watch as it drizzles down my palm. I examine my blistered skin, taking in every inch of the body that has housed me for the past 24 years—the times I have been in awe of its capability and the times I’ve wanted to rip it to shreds.
The ballerina’s body, the body that allowed the little girl to twirl across the marley and perform in front of massive crowds. The body that pirouetted on pointe shoes, the ones with the satin ribbon that suffocated her ankles. The body she was told wasn’t good enough, and the body that stared back at her, sometimes hauntingly, in the mirror.
The body that danced on tables in dive bars, wandered dizzily through fog machines at nightclubs, always covered in colorful tops and knee high boots and patterned jackets—dressing for herself yet somehow still fishing for compliments. Too confident but somehow still afraid. Too opinionated but somehow not loud enough. In some ways too reckless, too unconventional, but with a mind and body still labeled as too cautious more than anything else. Full of contradictions.
The body that has carried her across the world, who has brought her to the summit of Machu Picchu, the slope of the Alps, the cobblestone streets of medieval European cities, the foot of ancient Buddhist temples.
The body whose soul perhaps cares too deeply. The body who lets herself be held by strangers as she dances, and the same body that flinches easily. The body with the shoulders her friends rest their heads on. The body that is a safe harbor for others to land.
The body she assesses with panic. The body she is convinced is out to get her, shrouded in mystery or lurking with danger. The body that gives her the anxious, illogical mind. The body with the heart palpitations and dizzy spells and sweaty palms and the body whose biggest fear is its own collapse.
I tried my best to hide it, all the insecurities exposed in murky bath water. To the tune of the woman’s hum, I glanced lovingly at the people who surrounded me as we basked in the unsaid, universal truth and the deep understanding we all innately possess: we are scared and we are vulnerable and we are simultaneously told to love and hate the homes we inhabit.
The singing woman sits next to me and I catch a glimpse of her wrinkled skin resting in the water. I think about all the lives that skin has lived, all the things it has touched and loved and seen, and I can’t help but smile. She asks me to tell my story.
“I’m on my way to a wedding,” I say. “A high school classmate, an old friend of an old friend.”
I tell her that the wedding is in Thailand and we’re heading there soon and that I’ve never even been in love.
She nods and continues, “California dreamin’.”
And I cry again.
“I worked as an au pair in Paris last year,” I tell her. “I used to sing that song to the kids as I tucked them into bed at night.”
I wanted them to think that maybe there really is a place we can go to escape our problems, where the sky isn’t gray and the leaves don’t turn brown in the winter. Maybe it only exists in our heads. Maybe it’s a fool’s game to play. Maybe it doesn’t exist at all, or maybe the idea that it does actually keep us going. I tell her about the kids and my friends and my family and my writing and everything about Paris.
“It sounds like you have been in love—many times,” she says.
She confidently lifts her body from the bath, water gliding off her flesh like swans on the surface of a lake, and she wishes me a pleasant journey. The sound of her voice plays on repeat in my mind. I rest my chin on top of the bubbles. My whole life I have tried to keep my head above water.
I lace my damp hands together, listening to the sound of water squeezing into my palms. I know what it’s like to see a body destroyed. I know what it’s like to see a body who can’t take it anymore. I know what it’s like to lose friends to the deep, burdensome ache. I know what it’s like to be the daughter of a man who hated the vessel that housed him so much he filled it with liquor. I know that it’s like to be the daughter of a woman whose body has attacked her, whose Parkinson’s diagnosis makes her wither away—and forces us to watch.
Hot water droplets fall from the edges of my lips and I think about all the things that are trapped. My mind wanders again to that night in Malibu: the majestic colors in the sky and her pain splayed for the first time across the table. “All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray… If I didn’t tell her, I could leave today.” I want to shake her and announce how badly I need her here and scream all the secrets I’ve buried deep: that I have an ill-tempered, alcoholic father and a sick mother. That sometimes I worry my own turmoil will pull me against the current. That I’m trying to keep my head above water, that I’m trying to break the cycle and that I’m unwilling to be self-loathing.
***
On the 29th floor of the hotel in Bangkok, I watch as the young couple commits to a life of eternal devotion. The sticky air holds everything, all at once: the mauve sunset and the small talk and the conversation we had on the elevator ride up here about coincidences and delicate, intertwined moments.
“He would have loved this,” she says, and I know exactly what she means. The mutual connection that binds us all: our friend from high school who left us too soon, who should have been here, or who would have been here, if he hadn’t been the one to actually go through with it and take his own life.
I always wondered about the details of it. Why, but mostly how. How he mutilated his body so that he disappeared entirely. It’s perverse, I know, like rubbernecking at the wreckage, but I can’t peel my eyes from the scene.
I spend most of the night leaning against the glass railing, twirling my wine glass with my wrist, thinking about the deep, burdensome ache.
“Jordan! Get over here and hop in the photo!” breaks the mind-numbing silence.
The bride, with the most glamorous display of international friends, says she needs a picture with her “California people” so we squish our bodies together like sardines and the silhouette of a ghost dances gracefully in the pockets of empty space.
***
On Wednesday night at the hotel in Kyoto I rested my chin above the bubbles. I’ve always tried to keep my head above water. “California dreamin’” the woman sings, water droplets from her raggedy hair collecting on the ground beneath us, and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to immerse yourself, to absorb the grime of your own being and to embrace it entirely.
I am torched by scalding water, but how lucky am I to feel anything at all?
Jordan Holman is a recent graduate of UCLA’s Department of English—Creative Writing, and has published work in Sad Girl Diaries as well as Prose Online and Half and One. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she spent the past year living and working in Paris and often aims to integrate her travel and coming-of-age experiences into her work. She currently resides in Santa Monica.