Here, the streets of Marysville are clear of needles and dust. 

Here, when I am eight, I don’t find a used needle in the McDonald’s playpen and ask my grandmother, “What is this?” Brandishing the needle to her horror as she swoops it out of my hand and carefully throws it in the garbage. Some excuse about doctors on her lips.

The homeless are given homes. There are no men speaking to the air, no one shivering under the rain of a cold January night. My father has a bed to sleep in and enough medication. Here, my father is still alive. Here, there are no men shouting obscenities at me and my friends as we leave our middle school. The same old shouts of, “Ay mamacita” and “Que culo bien.” We don’t grow used to their shouts. No white people stand around offering us Jehovah’s Witness books. We are not judged for our spreading hips and sprouting breasts. There is no hell and there is no summer. It is eternal autumn here in Live Oak.

Here, the police of Gridley don’t profile my sister’s dad when he comes to visit. They don’t ask him why he’s waiting outside of the hospital for my mom. There are no bars we cannot enter, no sides of town that feel unsafe. We have kickbacks out in the open, and no one knows any slurs. We sleep under a sky full of stars, the slow earth watching us slumber. 

Here, the damp darkness of my mother’s low-income apartment in Arden is not so depressing. The concrete is softer. The apartment has been well-maintained for the last twenty years, and they never increase rent. The curtains are open to the sun, not closed as my mom takes another depression nap. Mom never stays up for weeks on end, never fucks random men in her room in the apartment so that my siblings can hear. She can see a psychiatrist easily and go to therapy regularly, no charge. The sirens don’t sound so much. We never hear news or police helicopters. Brown girls never go missing, or when they do people care. Cops don’t patrol the streets after George Floyd’s death, arresting “looters.” Looters that are all Black or Brown. 

My white grandfather doesn’t say that he is worried about my mom being one of the only white women in an apartment full of “unsafe people.” The implication of “unsafe people” being Black and Hispanic people is not clear. My great grandpa never says the n-word in front of me and my siblings. We never stare at him in shock. It never grows silent at the dinner table.There are decent government-assisted drug intervention and detox programs, not like the shitty Marysville rehab, which is just one floor and a dozen rooms, filled with inhabitants whose stays are mostly court-mandated and one therapist that comes weekly. My grandpa has access to be able to come down from heroin in a safe place. Here, I don’t have nightmares. Here, I wish on stars, and wishes come true. Here, I still believe in wishes and dreams and ancestral knowledge.