emerald city
possibly part one
You ever walk into a room and can just smell what everybody's thinking?
The city is a shallow bowl; in the distance you see the foothills, houses walking up streets; above that, the sky stretches, generous, overspilling. Some mornings it comes closer, foaming clouds pouring mannered rain into the broken sidewalks and over the asphalt. Inside the perforated shells of houses, you watch it fall without slant, fail to come in.
It's hard, when you're in a room of strangers, to remember that these are all people. A decade ago, this same group of people (or at least nominally the same, with some of the same faces) taught me that it was my responsibility to find this out; to elicit the humanity from the faces around me, to try to understand what they are hearing when you speak, and to speak to them, change what you say so that someone else can hear it. That honesty cannot be an activity undertaken in isolation. But walking in amongst them a decade later, I realize I still need to work at it, and maybe I'll always need to work at it. One of the problems with aging and growing is this: you learn to like yourself more, wherever you are, and when you go somewhere different and do something different and talk to different people, you don't always carry all of that with you. I've left pieces of me behind. I miss home. I miss the people I already know how to love.
I don't understand how the Bay Area works.
Here's how I think Bangalore works:
Once upon a time, you hated yourself, because you hated everything around you. Life came with a family, and with friends from school and from your street or your colony or your village. Once a year, four hundred thousand people shambled, in delirium, into classrooms around the country, to prove that they spoke the language in which (you were told) the secrets of the universe were discussed. Perhaps you even cared about this the way (some of) the examiners did. It didn't matter. This was your ticket to a better life.
In a thousand different ways, this exercise doesn't work for people. It didn't work for you. Maybe it was because you couldn't, but at any rate you didn't. Instead you ended up somewhere different, but not too different. Far, but not too far.
You realize that a different life doesn't exist. You realize that your dreams are not real. But you are free. You are somewhere with a thousand other shoulders rubbing up against yours, where you can build. Where you have just enough in hand, and more if you can beg or borrow or steal it, to make your dreams come true. Where the riches of the world will sometimes wash up, when you have something that they all need badly enough. When something has gone badly enough wrong that they have to look far, far afield, they will find you.
Bangalore is the shore of the place where things happen.
I love my friends. Here's how I learned to love them: I learned where they came from, and what they expected and needed, and what they were good at. And then I gave them what I could, and listened when they told me their stories, and let them love me back.
Two months into the formation of the current circle of seven-ish people who I spend the most time with these days: one of them put down his drink gently, stopped trying to tell the story he was trying to get through, and asked why none of us could fucking listen all the way through sixteen sentences without starting a tangent on the third. We took turns telling him that the answer was just ADHD; was just the joy we were feeling, hearing him say something that sparked something else in our brains, spilling over. There's material friction here. We loved the sound of our own voices. We loved singing counterpoint to him; the way jokes and asides and gossip and other stories built on each other. We were whipping each other into a froth and we were having fun.
He's mostly given up on telling long stories to us. In some ways this is good; he used to sort of hold court when speaking and it would test our patience. In other ways this is very bad, because he talks so rarely now. He likes listening to us, he knows we hear him and that he's loved, but he can't be fun and interesting in the way that he likes to be. His art of conversation has evolved to suit us; some of the fat's been shaved off, and some of the meat's gone with it.
I don't know how he feels about this. I wish I did. I hope he'll read this and tell me.
Lighthaven is close quarters. The many kitchens abut the many living rooms and dens. When you sit, you're sitting next to someone. You stand in a corner to file your nails, and across from you a tarot card is being drawn from a deck; a watering can is being filled in the sink you're leaning up against; in the next room, someone's laid back, typing, on a couch. You walk softly. You try not to eavesdrop on the many many conversations, but you can't help but want to cut in when it gets interesting. You're meant to, but only sometimes. You have to develop an ear for it.
People are frank about your work and solicitous about everything else; the way coworkers are. Food, water, sleep are frictionless. It's too cold for things to smell, but you worry about how you smell anyway. Once, your brother told you that one of his students could tell when he hadn't switched out his socks. You go most places, even over the ice-cold wet astroturf, barefoot; dirt is less offensive than sweat. It's like living in an office.
It feels to you like living in an office because you work in tech, and this is the city that decided how tech offices ought to be.
This whole city – this whole polycentric megalopolis – feels a little like living in an office. You can't help but wonder, over and over, where the real people are.
These are all real people. They prefer, and learn, and err, and fall in love. They eat and sweat and favor their lumbar spines.
There's a bay leaf in the bowl. There is a god, speaking in the ears of San Francisco, Berkeley, Redwood City, Oakland, San Jose. There is a smell you can't get out of your nose, coming off of everyone you speak to and listen to and watch as they regard their laptop screen, eyes half-lidded.
It is speaking to you.
It is speaking to me.
After three years and a little distance, finally, I think I understand what Bangalore's saying to me.
I don't yet understand what the Bay Area is saying to me.