Berkeley

 It was never meant for us.

You might be excused for thinking it was, because it was so beautiful. With its tree-lined avenues, distant hills that twinkled with lights after dark, the restaurant patios open until late in summer, the gentle sunlight that returned day after day through the green winter, you might think, of course this place was meant for us to enjoy. What else could it be for? Who else, when you enjoyed it so much?

But you were wrong.

You began to realize, strolling down the tree-lined avenues, that you would never look out and feel safe from one of those warm windows. The houses were beautiful. They were small, but they came in all colors, trimmed neatly with terra cotta, fronted by fruit trees and hanging vines that wafted enticing scents across the sidewalk.

But they were not for you.

The people in them never wanted you there. The beautiful houses had to stay the same, to be preserved, always with their bounty of zucchinis and lemons left out in baskets saying "Free." They would offer you the fruits of their gardens. But the houses were not for you.

But you accepted that. The houses might have made you angry, with their yellow terra cotta walls and wide bay windows, windows that you would never look out of and feel safe. But you let that pass by you. It was simply the price. To be there, to stroll down the tree-lined avenues, to wake up every morning to that everpresent sunlight, to be enticed by the smells of the hanging vines and eat the fruit that fell from the trees, it was worth it.

You thought there was something meant for us there, even if the houses were not.

We came there, and what we felt was meant for us there was each other. We came in groups; alone; from power; powerlessly. We came begging, and we came giving. We crammed ourselves into tiny rooms, or spent what we had on large rooms, polished wood floors, fruit trees.

(Fruit trees that we did not own.)

What we had, we shared.

But even this was not meant for us.

It was not enough, then, to have and to share. For this place was never meant for us. The fruit trees grew, and they brought us, and with us, the fruits of our labors. We worked. We strolled down the tree-lined avenues, at night, afterward, and told ourselves that one day this would all be ours.

But it was never meant for us.

We would work, and work, and keep on working, and it would consume us, swallowing the fruits of our labors as we swallowed the sweet plums from the trees.

If you ate the fruit, you might stay forever. If you stayed forever, you might eat the fruit. For some, the price was right.

For some, perhaps one day, after many years, they looked out of a small window and found that they felt safe. Perhaps they even had one fruit tree of their own.

Perhaps they did.

But I may never know. It was never meant for me.