It's my second official day as a NorCal transplant. My first day here I walked down to Pebble Beach and looked out at the rocky outcroppings just a couple hundred yards in to the sea and I felt my heart peel open. Open towards the sun sinking low by the waves, the freezing wind whipping through my hair and undoing the two-minutes I'd put into styling it, the cows mooing behind me.
The Safeway lady already knows me by name. Everyone at my Orientation was amazingly kind, in a way that says it's normal to be like that here. Like every smile isn't hiding a conniving corporate plan to undermine you and make you look ill-equipped at the earliest opportunity.
I have to relearn how to breathe. Deeply, so the last dredges of smog can be rinsed out of my lungs. The way people who live in a slice of heaven breathe when they smile at each other in the aisles and laugh when it takes two heads to find the butter because one can't do it alone.
I'm one of those people now. I need to learn the simpler way of living.
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