Cinder Inc.

When I created Cinder Inc., I wanted both myself and my wife Jess to be able to contribute and write a little bit. Jess wrote the following and wanted to add it to what’s here. Enjoy:

I had to do free writes for a class once and while they are a bit self-indulgent I think it’s the right format for this. I’ve been wanting to write about California, the why and how of my love. Here’s ten minutes to you my darling.

As a little girl California was the one state I never wanted to see. California was a land of bachelors who left their daughters so they could tan and look like Don Johnson and deliver mail. California was indulgence, too much sun I would say having never been there and then California was my deliverance from a boy/man who loved me more than I could love him and so the tan mailman became my dad in the flesh and I moved to live a dream of daughterhood that was so short lived I barely remember whether I told him he did look like Don Johnson. It still looks like it did. Someone told me my time in California would be a dream to me and I would find myself wet with rain with disgust with mold and I would barely remember the sand between my toes in my car in the crevices of my dashboard and they were right and every day I ached for the dream I could no longer live sometimes sitting at streetlights with rain streaming down my window mirroring the salt that poured down my cheeks but does not taste like the ocean does not smell like the ocean does not blow its scent around buildings everyday mundane buildings that house food and clothes and car parts but smell like the ocean. One day I found a reason to run back and it wasn’t my pain that propelled me to the land of my milk and honey but I tried to convince everyone it was. I took my best friends pain and buried it in my chest because I missed her smile that doesn’t look the same. My oasis became her tragedy, her mother’s eventual passing brought me home to a home that looked the same smelt the same and received me the same. Joni Mitchell asked California if it would take her as she was. And she asked California if it would take me and it did. I had a dream in Mt. Shasta that every jess I ever was had a meeting and this eventual Jess I’ve never seen was there and San Diego Jess was there still 125 pounds she smiled at me and laughed at my lines of fury and bitterness because she was still 125 pounds and wearing a t-shirt and khaki pants and she had freckles. And the Jess I’ve never seen waved good-bye to some of my Jessi’s and sent them on their way but she gathered me and San Diego Jess and a little Jess with pigtails up and put us in a station wagon and we drove off into the proverbial sunset of pink that is California.

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