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JASMINE KHALIQ CALIFORNIA with a line from Bob's Burgers where I grew up. I have to take you sometime, when it's partly sunny, seventy-two degrees, which is for months. if I can't remember the sky exactly that's the one veiling every memory. a default setting, constant beauty. in every direction you could drive it was towards some paradise: temperate, perfectly content. there would be the sea, an orange tree, a redwood, a burst of poppies. everywhere else it must have been worse, we agreed, that crème house at the end of our block— that woman would be worse, would really be racist if this were somewhere else, we said— here, that's nothing. I am so happy to live here, I said, to pass through vasco's hills every other sunday morning, to count the cows strewn alongside who must have loved that road as much as me. that journey its own paradise, vasco a landscape painting through my view, window from the backseat. you'll love it too, I have to show you sometime when the dogwood blankets whole streets. yes, in California it never rains and before every meal you will want to say grace yes white wine and tartare let's move don't you agree California it's beautiful the cows love dying up there back where dogwood flowers dissolve into lawn, so could we |