Today’s post is a short essay I wrote almost exactly 2 years ago, in 2022. It’s October again, and I’ve spent the past week in Cleveland (city of mystery), roving between my best friend’s house and my partner’s, cuddling with dogs, watching the sunset, marveling at the leaves, buying the best chocolate in the world. This place, which for the past few years has been a home of one kind or another, is on the brink of change as people in my circle will graduate and move away.
I had so much disdain for Cleveland when I first moved three years ago, in 2021—mostly my east coast elitism. Cleveland is the kind of place where you need a car to be a functional adult, which complicated my relationship to the city when I lived there without one. But the empty warehouses and open space also make room for wonderful artistic communities and very good food. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a simple place—for one, legacies of segregation and redlining are still extremely present. Just after I moved to Cleveland, the Opportunity Corridor project finished bulldozing a path across town where once there was a Black neighborhood. And despite being a blue county, Cleveland is also in a largely red state, a fact which you’d be hard-pressed to forget when passing billboards on the highway or anytime an ad break hits on TV.
Between 2021 and now, a whole life has happened. I wrote this mini essay two years ago, just after turning twenty-four and deciding to come back to Cleveland instead of moving to New York, to be closer to my best friend and to my partner. I still have the feeling that led me to write this essay, which is why I’m sharing it two years later.
This particular piece was about romantic love, but the first reason I ever came to Cleveland—the reason I’ll continue returning—is for my best friend. On this visit, we celebrated seventeen years of friendship at a favorite cocktail bar. I’m very grateful for all the love I have found in Cleveland, and hope to be back soon.
There’s a poem by Danez Smith called “I’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense.” It is about California’s perpetually beautiful weather, and I read it while visiting Palo Alto one February, while feeling something I could not name and watching the sky cloud with smoke from the fires.
California was a blip in my timeline. I woke in Cleveland at four in the morning just after a blizzard, and got off a plane into the San Francisco sunlight. It touched my face gently, as did the smiling faces of my friend and my boss taking me out for boba that day.
It was odd to be in so much light in the winter. I stole lemons from the trees on Stanford’s campus, marveled at the brightness of yellow flowers. I knew this dry heat from my parents’ homeland, but it was strange to see it juxtaposed against an American landscape. In California, I understood very suddenly and clearly what the point was of wearing sunglasses. The sun was simply there, always.
I was perturbed. Rachel, my friend from New England, put it into words. “Nothing ever happens,” she said to me. “The weather never changes, so nothing is happening or everything is happening, and isn’t that kind of the same thing?”
Things were happening, but in the strange rhythm of a dream. I worked a great deal, waking early to translate and then scrolling through monospace font for the rest of the workday. After 3pm, when my coworkers on the east coast had left for the day, Slack went eerily silent. Some days I worked on Stanford’s campus, stopping on the way home by the lemon tree, always taking sunglasses. If I was lucky, hummingbirds would come feast on flies near the bench where I worked, and I took a video to send back home. On Sundays, I wove through the bustling farmer’s market, buying produce no one could find farmed in the east: strawberries, avocados, citrus, fresh-caught fish. My red trench coat, bright and thrifted, stood out against the branded jackets everyone seemed to wear: Patagonia, Arcteryx, Cotopaxi. On the corner of the street where I lived was a spiritual temple with no specified religion; the next block over was a Middle Eastern market; the next block over was the green expanse of the Stanford football fields, where the curb would fill each night with RVs full of families with nowhere else to go.
California made no sense. San Francisco’s hills winded me and its ballet made me cry from beauty. Its money dazzled and terrified. The cable cars clanged and the CalTrain chugged, far too slowly for a metro area whose GDP had long since outstripped that of most countries. Homelessness was much more visible—of course it was; the weather never changed, never turned forbidding. The whole place struck me as incredibly sad, full of striving, cash, and hollow-eyed work, all of it colored a bright sheen by the perpetual sun.
I was struck by how easy it would have been to grow charmed, had there been nothing to pull me away. But I had something with astonishing gravity. There was someone: on the other end of the phone, whose voice matched mine in the evenings, who never asked me to come but for whom I knew I would return, especially on nights when Rachel was away. “Love is the only good thing,” she said, and often, especially when talking about California.
In March, Rachel and I took the train to Millbrae for Peking Duck. The bird was cooked to crisp, juicy perfection; the green beans we ordered burst full of garlic and salt on our tongues. I knew I wouldn’t get anything like this meal back east. We talked about everything and nothing, in the spirit of California. The scent of dry pines filled my nostrils as we walked back to the CalTrain. The next day, I ate poorly-cooked tofu at the airport. I boarded a flight to Cleveland.
He was waiting at the other end. What else, if not love? It was a quiet, fierce, and fiery thing, for which I was willing to sacrifice. I suppose people say the same about California.
It is October now; I am again returning from San Francisco. Back to Ohio—which I am not from but to which I keep returning. Being from the coast, I never thought I would come here. But love is, still, the only thing that makes sense. Nothing else.
I edited a piece by Amy Fan for Reboot! It’s about Caroline Ellison, mathbrain, “EV” and theories of change. I think it’s really good. Read it and let me know what you think!
I am preparing to attend ASSETS 2024 with my position paper on accessibility as a resource management issue! Please send any recommendations for St. John’s (in Newfoundland)!
Relatedly: I am recruiting participants for a study with accessibility professionals! Learn more (and sign up, if you qualify!) at this link.
Our provocation paper was accepted at the EvalEval workshop (NeurIPS)—see you in Vancouver in December :)
I turned 26 and celebrated by doing an apple tasting with my friend at Marché Jean-Talon (and some lovely dinners)!
Remnants. On the way to dinner, I also finally saw the Mussolini church.
Spot the celebrity!
I visited Boston/eastern MA, and Cleveland of course! And I had a handful of lovely visitors.
I was ill for the second half of September :(
I observed the High Holy Days with friends new & old!
On Rosh Hashanah, I sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in Leonard Cohen’s Mile End. Yes, I cried real tears.
I had friends over for a new year-protobirthday open house party!
I attended Kol Nidre this year at a gorgeous Reform synagogue in Cleveland.
I did a half-hearted ethnography of my local park, which I love wholeheartedly (and will be writing about as soon as I can)
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