We arrived in Maryland when I was eight years old. We'd driven cross country from California, leaving my father behind, waving from the driveway at dawn. It was my first time away from the west coast. I hated Maryland on sight, I hated the entire eastern United States in fact. Everything looked so cramped and old, the freeways crumbling, noisy steel plates all over the road surface, covering potholes and other symptoms of decay. Smokestacks and decrepit brick buildings with broken windows. No mountains, just these boring mild little slopes (even the earth seemed unwilling to try here), covered in puny green trees and anonymous foliage, like the sturdy foliage you see on the median of the highway, but all over. I never missed California, and the west, as painfully as I did then.

We pulled in at my uncle's house in the middle of the night. I didn't understand anything, I barely knew where we were or why or what was to come next. I didn't know these people and didn't want to. They smelled like strangers, not family. I was exhausted, my sisters were taken somewhere to sleep and I was shown an air mattress in a room full of household crap, an extra room that had become the de facto dumping ground room, every house has one. Now I was dumped there, on an air mattress that still smelled like the beach, and no pillow. I asked for a pillow, I remember the members of this family looking at each other like I'd asked for a chocolate-covered armadillo. I didn't understand, what was so amazing about asking for a pillow? It seemed like everything I did or said was some kind of transgression or embarrassing faux pas. There was shrugging, I remember them looking at each other for a long awkward moment, before my older cousin said "We don't use pillows, but we'll see what we can do." They scrambled to make me one on the fly, an old pillowcase stuffed lumpily with random laundry and rags. Who were these people? I lay with my head on this sham of a pillow and tried to figure out where I was and what was happening. All my plans started with an epic walk back to California.